May 2016 – Looking Forward

May 25, 2016

The Breakaway Brand Of 2016

To help me think about some businesses I’m involved with and what might be sustainable strategies for them, I’ve been reading Harvard Business School Professor Youngme Moon’s book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd — Standing Out In A World Where Conformity Reigns But Exceptions Rule.

Among the three kinds of often successful, but non-conformist, brand strategies that Professor Moon describes is the “breakaway brand”.

She starts with the story of Sony’s AIBO, an expensive, but not very useful and frequently non-functioning robot. In light of its very real limitations, the company positioned it not as a robot, but instead as a household pet. Branded as a pet, its quirky behavior and unresponsiveness to its owner’s commands at times (due to system errors) was acceptable, even expected. And many AIBO owners developed real understanding and affection for their “pet”.

In elaborating on the strategy, she wrote:

The new frame of reference — PET as opposed to ROBOT — has become an almost magical transformative device, transforming an instrumental product into a playful one, transforming a series of product flaws (“the voice recognition doesn’t work, and the thing rarely obeys commands”) into actual product benefits (“it’s a pet with a mind of its own”).

This, in a nutshell, is what breakaway brands are: They’re transformative devices. By presenting us with an alternative frame of reference, they encourage us to let go of the consumption posture we’re inclined to bring to a product and embrace entirely new terms of engagement instead. …

You could even say that breakaway brands revel in our stereotypes, since they make their living turning them upside down. We dream of someday owning a robot that will wait on us hand and foot, so what do these brands do? They give us a robot that we have to wait on hand and foot. …

These brands are the antithesis of well-behaved, and their mutiny is directed squarely at the category assumptions we bring to the table. And sometimes the transgression is more than a touch provocative; it’s a bit twisted as well. …

What a breakaway positioning strategy offers is the opportunity to achieve a kind of differentiation that is sustainable over the long term. … it has no competitors; it remains sui generis.

Then I put the book down to watch the news.

While I don’t normally write about politics and I’m not going to provide opinions about the candidates for US President here, this description — in a book published six years ago — struck me as being so clearly relevant to the 2016 rise of Donald Trump that I think it’s worth sharing.

Donald Trump hasn’t been educated as lawyer or political scientist or policy analyst and has not held public office. Instead, he is a businessman, with an education from one of the best business schools in the country and obvious skills at promotion. I have no idea if he has ever read this particular business book, but even if he hasn’t, he’s been pursuing exactly this strategy in politics with all of the extreme reactions — both positive and negative — that come to businesses pursuing breakaway brand strategies.

This helps me to understand the Trump phenomenon better. And the breakaway rethinking of the brand of President may also explain why Trump has maintained his support among voters regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of any of his positions and statements.

By the way, my guess is that this tweet indicates that Professor Moon herself is not at all happy about Trump.

And lest we think this is a one-time phenomenon, Professor Moon notes that:

In addition, these brands leave an indelible mark on their categories even after copycats emerge. In fact, this is what I tell my students: When you witness the birth of a breakaway brand, you are often witnessing the birth of an entirely new subcategory, one that is likely to alter the complexion of that industry well beyond the next business cycle. …

This, then, is what I mean when I say that breakaway brands succeed in transforming their industries. They leave their imprint by expanding product definitions, by stretching category boundaries, and by forcing competitors to play catch-up for years to come.

Of course, it remains to be seen how large a share of the “market” (the electorate) is attracted to this particular breakaway strategy — or if some other candidate in the future will find a new way of breaking away from what may have been the once-new, but then became conventional, behavior.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/144906867761/the-breakaway-brand-of-2016]

May 17, 2016

When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government? Still?

In 2009, I wrote a blog titled: “When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government?”

It’s time to see if much progress has been made, but first some background …

The
people that public officials call citizens or voters or residents are
not single-minded civic machines. Most of the time, they are consumers
and workers outside of the public sector. And so what happens outside
of the public sector affects their expectations of what should happen in
the public sector.

One of the more frequent parts of a
consumer’s life these days is being able to track things. Here are just
a few of the many diverse examples, almost all of which have been
around for at least a few years: track your Domino’s pizza
order from the oven to your front door; track shipments, at all stages,
through FedEx or UPS or even USPS; track the path of a car that you
ordered via Uber; track an airline flight so you know when to leave for the airport to pick up a relative or friend.

Why
not enable citizens to track their government transactions in
mid-stream? While suggestions of this kind are often proposed to
increase transparency of government, the tracking actually serves a much
simpler goal – to reduce frustration on the part of the citizen.

If
people can see where their request or application is, they will have a
lower sense of frustration and a greater sense of control. If the
citizens could also get an estimate of how long it usually takes to go
through each step of an approval process, all the better.

In the public sector, this kind of tracking was very rare in 2009. The standout was the UK, for example enabling residents to driving license applications.

Since
2009, we’ve seen some more ways to track requests and applications.
This has been especially true of requests under various freedom of
information laws, such as the US Justice Department’s. However, the
average citizen is not submitting FOIL requests – I suspect that most
come from media employees.

You can track your request for US government grants
– again something that the average citizen isn’t focused on. The US
Internal Revenue Service IRS2go app lets you track the status of your
refund, which is likely to be of interest to a much larger number of
people.

While it is difficult for me to judge from this distance
how well it actually works, certainly one of the broadest and most
ambitious efforts to let residents track their requests is in India, not the US or Europe even.

Alas, in New York City, the government’s website tells you call 311 to track applications for Food Stamps.

In South Carolina, a “Multi-Agency Partnership Portal”
provides a reasonably good way of applying for various health and
support programs. Although the website refers to seeing the status of
the application, it’s not clear from the documentation how you’d do that.

Colorado’s version of the same kind of website, called PEAK, makes it very easy to track status.

Although Indiana also does this, its website seems much more complicated than Colorado’s.

Even
the City of San Francisco, which aims to be a technology leader, has
had its difficulties in enabling people to do the simple tracking of,
for example, building permits. Its website refers back to a partial implementation two years ago, but no recent update.

Even worse, one of the examples from 2009 was from the District of Columbia, where you could the track the status of building permit applications. If you try that now, you’ll get this backtracking message:

“DCRA
has removed its permit status check page also known as Online Building
Permit Application Tracking (OBPAT) application from its website.

"DCRA
recognizes that some constituents are disappointed about this
decision. In short, DCRA found that-the information was too often
unreliable and resulted in misinformation to constituents. This is
totally unacceptable, DCRA is hopeful that the site will eventually be
restored, but the data issues must be resolved before it is. DCRA is
committed to transparency, but transparency is helpful when accurate
information is available. It is DCRA’s goal to have truthful, accurate
communication from staff, and the public access sites need to reflect
that as well.”

Clearly, there are still many situations where people want to track their interaction with the government and cannot.

(Of
course, the ultimate goal, in so far as possible, is to complete those
transactions instantaneously online, like the fishing license app that Michigan makes available. Then the tracking problem disappears, but that’s a subject for a future blog post.)

So the answer to the question?

In
the last seven years, there has only been a little progress here and
there in some areas of government, but not the massive change that
technology makes possible.

Consider an analogy. While
every government, for instance, expects that it needs a formal budget
document, most apparently don’t yet have an expectation that they need
to make it easy for people to find out the status of their requests for
common services. In this Internet age that is no longer something new. It’s time to get moving on it.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/144503228624/when-will-citizens-be-able-to-track-requests-to]

May 12, 2016

Quick Takes From The Recent News Stream

No time this week to write a full blog, so instead I figured I’d just
provide quick takes on some random items that have crossed my virtual
desk – on immigration, whether 65 is middle age, the ironic science museum and combining technologies.

Immigration to the US

Metrocosm has
put up an animated map show immigration to the US since 1820.
Considering the current debate in the Presidential campaign, it offers
some under-reported insights. See http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/

Is 65 Middle-Aged?

The Marist Poll is
frequently cited for its surveys of voters. Dr. Lee Miringoff, the
Director, has for a few years used his own birthday to assess how the
public views age. He just turned 65, so the question of the year: Is 65
middle-aged? Turns out that most American think so. You can see his
explanation in this video http://bcove.me/vcbs1k25 and the Marist report last week “5/3: 65 Stands Strong as Middle-Aged”

So
in an election year in which the three remaining Presidential
candidates are older than Dr. Miringoff, it does seem that 65 is the new
45!

The Ironic Science Museum

Then, in sort of a follow up to my previous report
about rising seas in Miami Beach, I read this story filled with irony.
Miami is in the process of building a glorious science museum, which
has had the usual kind of fiscal and management issues.

But Tuesday this week an article
appeared with this headline: “Miami’s Doomed Frost Museum of Science Is
a Monument to Ignoring Science … What do you get when you celebrate
science and ignore scientists? Fish in the lobby.” It shows how rising
seas will come right into the lobby of the museum – and we’re not
talking about the planned aquarium.

Depending on how you look at
it, this story is somehow sad, funny, and ironic – and a warning for
all people with ambitions that touch the waterfront.

Combining Technologies

With all sorts of new
consumer technologies that are connected to the Internet, it’s only a
matter of time and creativity for people to integrate those technologies
in useful ways. Case in point is Jason Goecke, the hacker who used his
Amazon Echo – thank you Alexa! – to get his Tesla to drive itself out
of the garage. You can see for yourself in this video: https://youtu.be/CAP3DbyOtGE

He posted his story at the end of last month here: http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-voice-command-amazon-echo/

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/144246816920/quick-takes-from-the-recent-news-stream]

May 3, 2016

Why Do We Still Have Tax Brackets?

We’ve just passed the tax deadline and reflecting on it I was vexed
again by this question: why do we still have these tables of brackets
that determine how much income tax we’re supposed to pay?

I can
understand there was a time, many decades ago, that the government
wanted to keep things simple so each person could easily determine the
tax rate that would apply. And I know that the continued use of tax
brackets is not the biggest problem around. However, tax brackets are
just another symptom of government’s failure to see the widespread
deployment of technology in the public and its failure to use basic
technology for simple improvements that are appropriate in this century.

Brackets
cause some problems. Politicians who advocate a single flat tax rate
often start with the argument that their approach would be so simple
people could just send in a postcard. Putting aside the merits or
demerits of a flat tax, for the moment, there is something retro about
telling people to use a postcard in 2016.

From 2000 to 2015, postcard usage dropped by more than two thirds, an
even greater drop than in first class envelope mail. The Washington
Post even had a story last year with a headline that asked “Are postcards obsolete?”

Where would we even find these postcards? Would the IRS mail them to us? 🙂

Those
who argue for flat taxes or lower taxes in the higher brackets
implicitly say that people will work less if it means an obvious jump in
tax rates by shifting into a higher bracket. There are also those who
advise people how to avoid this problem, as did a Forbes magazine article
last month which started out saying that

“the key tax challenge facing
retirees: being helplessly catapulted into rising tax brackets [because
our] tax code is progressive.”

Indeed, with the current set of progressive tax rates, your percentage of tax goes up as your income goes up.

But we no longer have to assume we live a world limited to paper-based tables.

There
is nothing in today’s world that requires the use of brackets in a
progressive tax system. Indeed, a system based on a formula instead
would eliminate the negative impacts of bracket-avoiding behavior that
critics of progressive taxation point to.

There are a few possible
formulas that might work. The most complex would be a logarithmic or
exponential curve, which a computer can nevertheless easily compute. If
you want to make it even simpler, another formula would set the
percentage tax rate as a percentage of income. (Remember school math?
TaxRate = m * Income where m is some small fraction.)

No matter
the formula, computers can handle it. The IRS could make a formula
available on line or over the phone — just enter your taxable income and
it will tell you what you owe. It can be built into the calculator
function of cell phones. There are tens of thousands of coders who
could finish this app in an afternoon.

Of course, the IRS says that it now offers an app, but it doesn’t take advantage of the computing power of the mobile device nor help you figure out the amount you owe.

While
we’re at the effort to bring government into the modern technological
era, let’s also consider where those taxes go. Why do we still have
fixed budgets?

The budget reform of the 1920s was developed in a
world that did not have the ability to dynamically make calculations.
So every year, government officials make their best guess on the
condition of the economy, the demand from an unknown number of
potentially needy citizens and other factors that determine the ebb and
flow of public finances. Since the budget process is lengthy, they make
this guess well ahead of time so they could be trying to predict the
future more than 18 months ahead of time.

A rolling budget would
work better by automatically adjusting each month to the flow of revenue
and the demands on government programs — and all you need is a big
spreadsheet on a not-so-big computer. However, the budget makers would
have to decide what their priorities are. For example, for every
percentage of unemployment, we need to put aside $X billion dollars for
unemployment insurance payments. It would take work to do this for each
of the promises the government makes — although maybe not as much work
as trying to guess the future.

(Of course, the real obstacle to a
rolling budget model is that policy makers would be forced to make more
explicit their priorities.)

I could go on, but you get the idea.
Buying billions of dollars of technology products is not enough.
Government needs also to bring technology into its thinking and design.

[Note: this is an update of my blog
post in 2012]

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/143790789669/why-do-we-still-have-tax-brackets]