Losing Count

 Over the last decade or so I really have lost count of the number of times I’ve had to tell somebody that the business case we are discussing really isn’t as simple as they’re making it out to be. Part of that is just because I spent most of the last 12 years teaching business strategy and policy to undergraduate business students, but in fairness most people like problems with simple solutions, and are therefore prone to looking for simple solutions to every problem. But if running a business was really as simple as it looks you wouldn’t need people to manage them, and my students and I would all be out of a job…

Consider, if you will, a case that came up last week about a customer who ordered a bicycle online for pickup at a local dealership. Unfortunately, the bike in question has a load limit of 300 pounds, and when the customer turned up at the story to collect his purchase it became apparent that he was somewhat heavier than that. The article in the Global News doesn’t specify the customer’s exact weight, and he wasn’t willing to disclose it to the interviewer, but it was obvious enough that the owner of the bike shop refused to let the customer leave with the bicycle. This went over about as well as you would expect…

The shop’s owner argued that if the customer got on the bike at his current weight there was a non-zero chance that the frame would collapse, causing possibly serious injury. This is true, by the way – and if such a frame failure occurred while the customer was riding in traffic there is a real possibility that he could be killed in the resulting accident. The owner explains that not only was he unwilling to risk the legal exposure, but he felt that he had an ethical responsibility not to allow someone to be injured or killed by something he sold them...

The customer, in turn, argued that he knew better than to use his purchase in an unsafe manner, that he would wait until he had lost enough weight to get below the 300 pound limit before trying to ride his new purchase, and in any case it was a legal purchase and nobody else’s business what he did with it. The owner offered to store the bike for him until he reached the weight limit, refund his money so the customer could buy something else, or just release the bike if the customer would sign a waiver promising not to sue in the event of a frame failure, but the customer said he didn’t think he should have to sign a waiver just to pick up something he had already paid for…

Now, one could reasonably argue that a business can’t be held responsible for the unsafe usage of its products, no matter what those products happen to be. If a hardware store sells someone a chainsaw, and the customer manages to injure himself (fatally or otherwise) while trying to learn how to juggle chainsaws, no one is going to blame the owner of the store. The problem here is that riding a bicycle isn’t an obvious misuse of the product, and even if the bike shop (or the manufacturer) can claim to have pointed out the weight limit and the risks involved in exceeding it, there’s still a possibility that a jury might find against them…

I don’t have a simple answer to this question, either; as I noted at the top of this post, I’m not sure there is one. The underlying problem is that the standard in a civil trial isn’t “beyond a reasonable doubt,” it’s “what a reasonably prudent person would expect.” You also don’t have to convince all twelve members of the jury that you are correct; you only need 50% of them plus one. As tempting as it might be to just say the customer was warned about the hazards of the situation, and he can make up his own mind about safety, I think it is understandable as to why the owner of the bike shop is reluctant to roll those dice without at least a signed statement acknowledging that the customer was, in fact, warned about those hazards. Especially considering that nothing in this story suggests that the customer actually is reasonable or prudent. But even leaving the legal, ethical, or moral implications out of it, how does one resolve this problem from a practical standpoint?

Don’t Tell Me What’s Impossible!

 There was a time when the only people who ever wondered if comic book technology would be possible in the real world were dyed-in-the-wool science fiction geeks, like me and my friends, and in fairness we also wondered if super powers were possible, if psychic powers were possible, if faster-than-light travel was possible, if magic was possible, if cloaking devices were possible, if artificial intelligence was possible, if cloning was possible, if time travel was possible, if alien life forms actually existed, if Big Foot really existed, if any of the cryptozoology critters you read about really existed, if adult women who actually like geeks (like us) really existed, and if it was actually possible to talk with one without spontaneously combusting…

Fortunately for all of us – including that significant portion of the world’s population that had never considered any of those questions until now – some of us geeks grew up with the talents, education, wealth, or simple chutzpah to investigate these questions. Consequently, computers more powerful than anything NASA owned when we went to the Moon fit into the back of your cell phone, robots are now exploring the surface of Mars (and building all manner of consumer products right here in Michigan), there has been an honest-to-Buck-Rodgers space station orbiting the Earth for the past twenty-two years (as of 2021), and a team of brilliant lunatics have not only build 3-D printers that can print things made out of titanium, they also allowed Adam Savage from Myth Busters to build a flying version of the Iron Man armor with it…

I found the video on YouTube, but you can probably get more information off the Science Channel website, since the project was part of Adam’s new series airing on that network. Although, according to the linked file, producing this particular episode seems to have consisted of asking Adam if there was any project he felt like doing and then getting out of his way, since he already knew the people who had invented the titanium 3-D printer and the jet pack system necessary to make the suit fly. The result is every bit as amazing as you would probably expect, especially when you consider that in addition to taking off and flying around the hangar complex under its own power, the suit also turns out to really be bullet-proof and capable of shrugging off an explosion from three feet away…

Now, by this point I’m pretty sure that anyone reading this post (assuming I have readers) is asking why I’m geeking out over mad science and/or bewildering technology instead of just making notes on a business page. And I have to admit it’s a fair question; I have no idea what the commercial possibilities of a flying suit of bullet-proof and bomb-proof armor might be, or even what the business implications of being able to 3-D print materials as hard and rigid as titanium might turn out to be. What I do know is that when I was a kid both the 3-D printer and the Internet itself would have been considered comic-book fantasy, no more realistic than transparent airplanes, super-powered aliens who grew up in Kansas, or the Norse God of Thunder fighting crime in New York City…

For as long as I can remember, one of my pet peeves has been people telling me that things about which they know absolutely nothing are impossible, particularly when some of those things were already happening. When I grew up and realized that people were destroying perfectly good companies the same way, with all of the ill effects for the world and all of humanity that such destruction implies, it became more than just a simple irritant. Finding out why people do these things, and getting them to stop, has been the focus of my life for most of the past two decades, and the motivation for my misadventures in academia in the first place. Because the truth is, I have no more idea what weird, wonderful, and completely insane technological developments will pop up the next time I go wandering around on the Internet than anyone else, let alone what the commercial implications of those achievements might be…

But I’m quite certain that we all need to be more careful about saying things like “That’s Impossible!” Before more of us end up having to eat our words…

Crime Doesn’t Pay – Does it?

 Over the years I have written a number of posts in this space about the scourge that robocalls have become over the years, rising from the relatively minor nuisance in my childhood to the present conditions where just answering the telephone can result in becoming the victim of any number of fraud methods. Efforts to eliminate these calls and their associated crimes by legislation have largely failed because it can be extremely difficult to catch the parties involved, many of whom are based outside of the United States, and because motivation for pursuing such cases is inconsistent. A story being reported in USA Today this week may have the answer to one or both problems, however…

According to the article by Mark Snider in USA Today last Wednesday, the FCC had succeeded in tracking down a telemarketing company based in Texas that had been responsible for over a billion such calls, mostly made by “spoofing” real telephone numbers from other area codes. In this case, the calls purported to offer low-cost health insurance from well-known providers, but actually routed anyone who responded to the calls to a call center not affiliated with any of those companies. It was a highly lucrative and significantly destructive scam, and there is nothing to suggest that the companies involved would have stopped committing it, until FCC fined the telemarketers a record $225 million USD…

I’m not primarily a crime writer, but a brief study of the subject will reveal dozens of cases where a specific crime died out when it was no longer profitable to commit. A familiar example might be that when it was no longer possible to make any significant money selling stolen car radios, the number of those crimes decreased from incredibly common in the early 1990s to almost unknown today. Increased penalties by themselves are generally ineffective in deterring crime, since the penalty involved will be irrelevant if there is no chance of being caught, but there are numerous historical examples where fines levied against specific criminals became an important source of revenue for law enforcement officers, or the communities employing them…

Now, I’m not suggesting that municipalities and states engaging in self-funding through the application of excessive fines is necessarily a good idea. History also records a vast number of cases where the enforcement of such laws led directly to major cases of corruption, either by the law enforcement agencies of their employers. But, by the same token, $225 million is enough money to run government agencies of significant size, and the motivation to make arrests that could yield that much revenue is going to be powerful. Combining those factors would make the crime of illegal robocalls much less attractive while at the same time offering a real chance at balancing the budget for many cities and counties…

Realistically, of course, these prosecutions will not eliminate any crime. If fraud committed by telephone auto dialer becomes cost-prohibitive the criminals involved will simply move on to some other form of fraud on some other platform, and the cities involved will have to find some other way to fund their operations. But, speaking as someone who gets between five and ten of these fraudulent calls a day, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these companies being driven out of business, even nobody figures out how to fund our town’s government operations into the bargain…

Missing an Opportunity?

 Like a lot of Americans who are not supporters of the previous Presidential administration I was quite amused to read the story of how Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks museum in San Antonio had been forced to remove its wax figure of our previous President from public display. According to the story on the San Antonio Current website, the company was concerned about the figure taking any further damage because visitors to the museum keep punching it in the face. A host of sarcastic remarks, a few of which might be considered outright gloating, went streaming through my mind, but then it occurred to me that the company may be overlooking a new business opportunity that is right under their collective nose…

Even a cursory glance at the news from the last two months should suggest to any alert observer that there are many people in this country who would quite like to punch the actual 45^th President of the United States in the face, but are unable to do so because such an activity is both illegal and also likely to result in being shot repeatedly by Secret Service agents. Punching a wax figure would likely not be as satisfying, but it would be much safer. If the figure was sufficiently life-like the museum could offer action photography, color or black-and-white, of guests apparently punching the former President in the face, although video would be problematic in the sense that it would not accurately simulate the sound of the punch landing or the action of an actual person falling to the floor after being punched…

Having reached that conclusion, it occurred to me that this would only scratch the surface of such a new business model. Tussaud’s Waxworks can, in theory, produce life-sized effigies of virtually any known person, living or dead, of whom a sufficiently detailed photograph exists. This means that, potentially, they could sell anyone the opportunity to punch the image of any person who affronts them in the face, along with a set of glossy photographs either printed on-site or captured on disc for future reproduction. And, unlike a photoshopped image, these pictures would not show any signs of digital tampering, because, of course, they would not have been falsified in any way…

Whether or not such a service would be feasible from a legal standpoint is less clear. Public figures have less control over the fair usage of their name and image than most private citizens do, and just allowing people to punch an effigy of someone in the face does not introduce any particular claims about that someone. One could easily imagine a court ruling against a business which had chosen to display a wax figure of the 45^th President in a compromising position with one or more of the dictators with whom he was known for currying favor, for example, or an effigy of our ex-President with his head emerging from the digestive tract of an animal, but explaining what material harm is caused to any individual by allowing customers to punch his three-dimensional image in the head would be harder to accomplish…

Some municipalities within the United States have laws against using pictures of actual people as targets for pistol or rifle shooting, and if San Antonio has one it could be argued that such a ban should extend to any simulated act of violence against any individual, no matter how obviously simulated it might be. Alternately, one might imagine cities, counties or states passing laws that would render acts of simulated violence against one or more classes of people illegal in that jurisdiction, for reasons of decorum, public safety, or inappropriate use of wax works. And, I suppose, it is possible that such a service would be cost-prohibitive, or require a price-point too high to attract a sufficient number of customers. But, on the other side of the issue, it might also be possible for the company to produce a more life-like effigy, e.g. one that would look, feel, or even sound much more like a real person when being punched in the face…

If so, I really hope that someone at Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks gets started on these improved models straight away – because I can think of a number of public and historical figures I would be willing to pay to punch in the face…

And I don’t believe that I’m the only one who would…

Two Kinds of Error

Over the past decade I’ve devoted a lot of time in this space to complaining about – and occasionally making fun of – the vast oceans of misinformation that can be found almost everywhere online. Although, to be fair, I mostly complain about people who blindly accept everything they read online, and make fun of the often nonsensical actions they take in consequence. For example, some years ago I wrote about a bit of clickbait claiming that Don Knotts had just revealed the “real” reason for his departure from the Andy Griffith Show, despite the fact that this iconic American actor had been dead for eleven years at the time. I also strongly implied that anyone who blindly clicked on the link, let alone believed the absurd misinformation they would find there was a complete sucker…

Recently, though, I’ve become concerned with the opposite phenomenon appearing with increasing frequency – that is, people finding perfectly reasonable, carefully documented information online and refusing to believe it anyway. One could argue, as I have on occasion, that this error is the other side of the same coin. For example, members of the “anti-vax” movement heard about a single, laughably unprofessional, long since discredited theory about vaccines being tied to autism, and have re-introduced potentially fatal diseases into the United States while they cling to that theory, while as many as one-third of Americans have seen repeated information explaining how the use of facial coverings could end the pandemic in a matter of weeks, but are still refusing to wear them…

The point was brought home to me personally this week when I ran across a Buzzfeed list article about outrageous things college professors said their students had done. It would be easy to dismiss the entire list as being fictional, or at best highly exaggerated, except for the fact that I have seen several of these behaviors first-hand over the last decade at work, some of them repeatedly. It isn’t at all unusual for students to cite things their mother told them as proof of their thesis, demand an explanation for receiving zero credit for work they copied and pasted directly out of Wikipedia or failed to turn in at all, or demanding a different presentation date despite having had four months to prepare…

Any readers familiar with statistics (assuming I have readers) will recognize this basic problem as the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 errors, but if you are unfamiliar with the terms, the upshot is that accepting incorrect information is just as problematic as failing to accept correct information. That is, accepting universally-acknowledged quackery is going to be just as harmful as rejecting elementary best practices, even in cases less serious than the spread of potentially fatal pathogens. And in the current age of information, both types of error are far more dangerous than they have ever been before…

This post was originally going to be a humorous and sarcastic set of comments on things I saw in the classroom as a college instructor, including a few things even more absurd than the people at Buzzfeed put on their list. I could tell you stories about the kid who not only plagiarized a paper, but tried to turn in a paper that had been submitted to me, in the same class, during the previous semester, or the unfortunate individual who missed a term paper deadline because he was in jail that morning. But half-way through that post I realized that there was an actual point to be made here…

In today’s interconnected world, every one of us has access, at least in theory, to every bit of information, reliable or not, that has ever existed. Verifying any particular fact you come across is easier than it was at any previous time in history, but figuring out which data points you should accept, and which ones must be rejected is arguably the hardest it has ever been. Regrettably, though, the consequences of making either error are also orders of magnitude worse than they have ever been – and the fact that we are now being inundated by people deliberately spreading misinformation, disinformation, or outright lies is not helping. Going forward, all of us have got to try harder to get this right, before we lose another half-million (and counting) people for no reason at all…

Think It Through

There are times when I really wish I had chosen to study Marketing in business school instead of Management. The first time, at MBA level, I still believed that there was a place in the world for a generalist who just wants to get on with the job at hand. The second time, I was looking for the answer to why the senior management teams of otherwise perfectly good companies keep running their firms directly into the ground, and it seemed reasonable to study the actions and strategies of the senior managers themselves. And, of course, both times through I knew I didn’t have the math for it. But quite apart from that, and leaving out the absurd bias my former department has against applied research (and the practitioners who apply it), I have noted a large number of the aforementioned management failures that relate directly to marketing decisions that even a reasonably bright six-year-old would have known better than to make…

A case in point would be Burger King’s attempt at a marketing tweet this week. I picked up the story from USA Today, but you can find details about it all over the Internet as of today. Actually a series of three tweets, the first one said “Women belong in the kitchen.” The second one pointed out that women comprise only about 20% of all professional chefs, and the third tweet introduced a new Burger King program to provide scholarships for women attending culinary schools – thus correcting the shortfall. It’s a marketing/public relations move that has some real potential, timed to coincide with International Women’s Day 2021, but whoever came up with it seems to have missed just how badly the first tweet would be received – and how likely people were to ignore tweets two and three, particularly if they were already angered by tweet number one…

It seems possible that the company was attempting to emulate the success that Wendy’s has already had with their company’s Twitter account, which has become known (if not exactly famous) for its humorously sarcastic tweets over the last few years. Unfortunately, whoever came up with this triple tweet appears to be unfamiliar with the convention of indicating a multipart tweet by putting the notation 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3, or however many tweets the message takes up. They’re also ignoring the tendency of people to stop reading something that angers them, as well as the fact that this particular message is neither sarcastic nor amusing…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that if I had a Marketing degree I would be able to tell any company when their attempt at being hip, edgy, or at least relevant was about to crater. But this isn’t the first attempt at Twitter advertising or other online marketing attempts to fly wide of the mark, and it isn’t even Burger King’s first absurdly offensive failed marketing attempt. Regular readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) will recall an earlier post about a Burger King ad featuring a new oblong burger product and a woman’s face apparently looking at it with an expression that could be interpreted as awe, fear, or revulsion, depending on your point of view…

It doesn’t take a lot of familiarity with failure analysis, let alone a graduate degree in Marketing, to recognize that the company has an unfortunate history with advertising that is not as clever or funny as they think it is, or that any future attempts at witty, edgy, or viral advertising are likely to attract greater scrutiny than they seem to have expected. You have to wonder if the person operating the Burger King  twitter feed ran this idea past anyone else – and if so, whether the “anyone else” included any actual women. Or, for that matter, anyone who had ever met an actual woman…

Other authors have written about the propensity of supposedly brilliant leaders in movies and television programs to formulate elaborate plans in which any ordinary six-year-old would be able to find obvious flaws, and suggested that if they ever have the chance to be the “evil overlord” or equivalent they will run all of their plans such an individual. It seems excessive to suggest that the senior management at Burger King should consider the same advice, but if they want the advice of a scruffy blogger who used to teach Business Strategy at a top business school, I do have some time available…

Try It Again, Folks

If you’re the type who follows aerospace news, you’ve probably already seen the footage of the Space-X “Starship” prototype exploding a few minutes after what had, to that point, been its first successful high-altitude flight and soft landing. If not, you may not have known or cared that the two previous landings ended the same way. After all, other than hardcore space wonks like your humble blogger, who really cares if an eccentric billionaire’s pet project works out or not? Elon Musk clearly has the money to spend on this weird science-geek hobby, and if he wants to spend it on an epic-scale model rocketry kit, what difference does that make?

Well, in addition to being a hardcore space wonk (since 1968!) I’m also a business blogger and former business teacher, and I have to say that dismissing the latest Space-X explosion as merely a novelty (or even worse, a vanity project) would be a mistake for financial, economic, and historical reasons. The financial opportunities presented by the commercial exploitation of space have been enumerated by many authors, and need not delay us here; nor does it require any great understanding of business or finance to grasp the benefit of the jobs provided by Space-X itself, and by the many companies from which it buys materials. But failing to grasp the historical and economic significance of the rise of private spacecraft and launchers is difficult to excuse as anything other than being two generations behind the times…

Fifty years ago, private space exploration lay entirely in the realm of science fiction. Putting a person – or even a good-sized satellite – into orbit was possible only for a national government, and indeed only two of those had managed it. Even more daunting, perhaps, was that both the American and Soviet space programs had suffered humiliating failures by 1970, with a plethora of rockets exploding on the launch pad, or shortly thereafter, and at least one fatal accident each. The idea of a private citizen building a space-worthy rocket was the stuff of children’s books, fantasy stories, and (in 1979) comedic adventure television programs staring Andy Griffith. And yet, even then, there were historical perspectives that should have told us otherwise…

In 1903 the airplane had no practical applications, and the automobile wasn’t much better; neither one was anything a modern audience would call safe, either. And yet, thirty years later the first of the Douglas Commercial airplanes was built, followed two years after that by the DC-3. Air travel became a common feature of life, and dozens of commercially viable firms began offering it. The same period saw the rise of literally dozens of automakers, proliferation of highways, and expansion of companies selling everything from internal combustion engines to tree-shaped air fresheners. Today it would be virtually impossible to imagine the world without those two industries…

Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone standing on the dunes at Kitty Hawk in 1903 could have predicted the use of airpower in either world war, let alone the 747, the A380, or the SR-71. And we can only wonder what Henry Ford would have thought about self-driving cars, hybrid vehicles, or jet-powered ground vehicles (it’s a stretch to call them “cars”) that can break the speed of sound. But anyone who dismissed those technologies, or discounted their commercial possibilities, based on the failure of early applications would feel like an idiot in today’s world – and I’d be willing to be that anyone who dismisses Space-X or any of the other private spacecraft companies that are getting started today is going to feel even dumber in just another generation or two…