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Top of Mind Thursday Memo Archive
Top of Mind Thursday – February 15, 2024: What a Difference a Decimal Makes
On Tuesday, ride sharing company Lyft astounded the market when it announced its profit margins were expected to grow by 500 basis points (5%) this year—sending their stock soaring.
There was only one problem: It wasn’t true.
What the earnings report should have said was that margins would grow by 50 basis points, or 1/2 percent. Whoops.
The company issued a correction and apologized for the error. The CEO said the company has a process where “thousands of eyes” review an earning release. And yet no one caught the error.
Most of the time an inadvertent error like this doesn’t cause such a big stir. But then there are those occasions where something small, like an extra zero or the wrong measurement, can be disastrous.
In 1999, NASA lost a craft that traveled for 10 months to Mars, only to crash on landing because navigational commands hadn’t been translated from English to metric measurements. Really big whoops.
None of us is perfect, and mistakes happen. But successful organizations learn from errors like this and put in safeguards so they don’t happen again.
In the case of Lyft, all those eyes reviewing the release either weren’t looking at the right numbers, or they were so close to the situation that they literally didn’t see the difference between 50 and 500.
One thing I’ve learned from decades of writing and editing is that you can’t proofread your own stuff. There isn’t a selfie stuck long enough to give you the perspective to see things from an outsider’s perspective.
But the good news is it’s not difficult to find someone who can fill that role for you—and help avoid the bumpy ride Lyft took this week.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
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Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 8, 2024: Not Knowing What You Don’t Know
I got absolutely no email for 12 hours yesterday.
Nada. No responses to email I sent. No messages I was expecting from clients and colleagues. No promotional offers. Not even a single piece of spam.
It turns out that on Feb 1st, Google and Yahoo implemented a new verification to prevent spam from email senders. This requires new authentication processes put in place for newsletters like this one.
It also meant that some of my 1:1 emails to and from clients and others were now blocked. In an effort to fix the problem, my domain provider actually made things worse, so that for half a day nothing got through at all. If you tried to email me yesterday, you probably got an error saying my account didn’t exist. Gee, where did Linda go?
While it was nice not to have all that unimportant stuff to wade through, it was also annoying. What important messages was I missing? People who had my cell number began texting me, but others may have just given up. Was it worth it to keep trying to reach me? Maybe not.
The problem with not getting information is you don’t know what it is you don’t know. And while not getting email for a day is not a life-threatening situation, not getting other information might be.
During the pandemic, many people put off routine medical screenings. As a result, more cancers were missed and caught later, when they were harder to treat—resulting in an unexpected rise in cancer-related deaths.
If you are an air traffic controller or a brain surgeon, not knowing critical information could be the difference between landing the plane safely or saving the patient—and disaster. If you’re a type 1 diabetic and don’t know if your blood sugar is very low or very high, you can wind up in the hospital—or worse.
And if you run a business, not knowing when your customers need your help can be the beginning of the end of the relationship.
What systems do you have in place to make sure you are up to speed on what’s going on in your business? How will you limit what it is you don’t know but should?
The only thing worse than finding out you have a serious problem is not finding out until it’s too late to fix it. If only you’d known what it is you didn’t know. . . .
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 1, 2024: There’s a Conspiracy for That!
Conspiracy theories have probably been around since the beginning of time.
There are those who say Nero set fire to Rome, then fiddled while Rome burned (even though the fiddle hadn’t been invented yet). For centuries, there have been those who believe in the blood libel that Jews would kill Christian children and use their blood in Passover rituals (despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence Jews ever used humans in any part of ritual sacrifice).
More recently, we’ve heard the Earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, 9/11 was set up by the American government, Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and Hillary Clinton was part of a cabal that hid sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC (Spoiler alert: a number of countries have gone to the moon, Osama bin Laden planned 9/11, Obama was born in Hawaii, and the pizza party building has no basement. Plus I’ve yet to hear anyone falling off the edge of the Earth).
But now we’ve got a new twist: To leverage the relationship between Travis Kelce and superstar performer Taylor Swift, the NFL and the Biden administration rigged this year’s football season so that the Kansas City Chiefs would play in the Super Bowl and Swift would be able to nefariously convert football fans into Democratic voters.
There are so many things off about this theory that it’s hard to know where to begin. Kelce and Swift didn’t start dating till September—how did anyone know this would turn into a “thing”? And how exactly did the NFL rig the entire football season to ensure that the Chiefs would wind up at AFC Champions? Swift has in the past encouraged her fans to register to vote, but how does that make her a patsy of the Biden administration? And why should we believe football fans would change their voting preferences because of anything Taylor Swift said anyway? Does the conspiracy include having the SF 49ers almost losing their conference championship game before pulling out a win in the second half?
There’s no logic to any of this or the slight bit of evidence, but the problem with conspiracies is that’s what makes them so enticing. The fact that no evidence exists makes followers even more certain of the conspiracy: It just proves there’s a deep state supporting the conspiracy. Arguing with a conspiracy theorist will likely just make them dig in deeper and presume you are part of the conspiracy too.
But sometimes just bringing a theory out of the shadows and exposing it to light will help others realize how absurd that theory is. If you don’t believe me, just wait a few minutes. I heard there’s a new conspiracy brewing about how this all works.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – January 25, 2024: Shattering a Record
This week, a new record was set in NCAA Division I basketball–the most wins by a college basketball coach:
The coach that broke Duke Coach Mike Krzyzweski’s record with 1203 career wins is Tara Vanderveer, long-time coach of the Stanford Women’s Basketball team.
Over 38 years, Tara has coached the Stanford women’s team to three NCAA titles, was named national coach of the year five times and Pac-12 coach of the year 17 times, and coached the US women’s team to Olympic Gold in 1996.
Throughout her long career, Tara has inspired women athletes of all ages, advocated for equity in women’s sports, and pushed for more hiring of female coaches. Just as important, on a daily basis, she pushed her players to be role models—both on the court and off.
My daughter had the opportunity to be a ball girl for the Stanford women’s team for two years, during which she got to see the way Tara operated up close. Where egos and personalities often dominate the men’s game, Tara’s players were always the epitome of role models: showing great sportsmanship and professionalism regardless of the outcome of a game. The team always came first, regardless of the talent or aspirations of any individual player.
Over nearly half a century, Tara has taken women’s basketball to a new level. There’s a new GOAT in college basketball, and it’s fitting that Tara wears the crown.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com