Interesting Ideas Update

Bad things don’t happen to people who don’t care.

Weird, Wacky and Just
Plain Embarrassing Business Names From the Grog N Groc Hall of Fame

Order the book here

This comment from the business name page deserves featuring since it is an instance of the all-important “things” concept.

Tracy Says:

1. July 19th, 2006 at 11:04 am We have “Taste Good” Chinese Restaurant here, and there’s this place that was called “Ying’s” and then he added more and called it “Ying’s Wings”. That wasn’t enough, though, it became “Ying’s Wings and Things”. That was before he built the bar area. The name now? “Ying’s Wings, Things and Bar”.Here’s their website:
   http://www.yingswingsthings.com/

Today a marketing research video showed a respondent talking about her laptop. Her affection was so palpable that, as the analysis pointed out, it looked like she was ready to embrace it.

And for good reason. It truly is not just a unit for computing. It’s the place where she keep so much that is important by any fair measure — probably all the pictures of who she loves and where she’s been, all the music she listens to, all the phone numbers she calls. It’s got all the letters she’s written, and most of the answers. It’s where she stores her ideas, if she has any. It projects her movies. It’s got the basic tools she uses for running her life. It’s liable to be full of jokes, things to see and tasks to do.

What’s amazing isn’t that the computer matters to her, it’s that she sees it at all. This is a brief historic moment when the technology is good enough to bring all that stuff together, but new enough that anyone notices. In another few years the laptop — or the device that replaces it — will just be a machine, just so much junk, the way the desktop PC or the Walkman are just things we use, amazing as they were in their time.

The firm that did the research really should preserve the clip for a future museum of technical progress. It’s always striking to see how the things that are utterly normal to us today meant something totally different in another context.

I should admit that I sometimes get a flash of that same feeling about my laptop, as wheezy a solution as it is for holding much of what I treasure. While it still matters, I suppose I should get myself one that I too can treasure, if only for a few moments before it fades into the routines of just so much stuff.

Even the most brilliant, historically proven governing strategies can come to grief. The Russian czars relied on a track record of dimness, bureaucratic idiocy and stubbornness to create mass fatalism. But that cocoon was breached by the disasters of the Great War. Russians who had put up with their rulers’ incompetence for decades had finally had enough.

Now we see our own triumphant incompetent, George W. Bush, continuing to reel from Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes even the most cynical public actually expects performance from its highest leaders. It may be premature to expect actual heads to roll, but it does seem like public tolerance for things like cronyism and inexcusable warmaking is, for the moment, greatly diminished.

For more on the strategic use of incompetence in the business, political and spiritual realms, see my article Compound Ineptitude, a theory of corporate incompetence. (Staying stupid means never having to say no.)