You may have already been following this, but Apple has now denied the Bloomberg spy chip story a couple of times. Here's my original post, Has Your Electronic Hardware Been Hacked?, and the original Bloomberg post, The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies. Techcrunch has a prior story with links to more of the denials.
While I'm in no position to know whether the story is valid or not, it can be an interesting exercise thinking about why the various respective parties might have an interest in denying the story. Similarly, it's probably worth spending a bit of time thinking about why, if it isn't true, the story was published and what might be behind it.
All of that being said, thematically, concerns about technology back doors being placed into electronic devices -- and the implications of these vectors -- will continue to be an ongoing theme.
Caveat Emptor.
------- Update: ----------
You may find this to be pushing into the "conspiracy" end of the spectrum, but here's an interesting look into some of the nuances of the language of rebuttals from the Emptywheel blog. There's also a good breakout of the story into a timeline with links to some of the stories at the time they emerged (I found the Apple, SuperMicro firmware thread to be particularly interesting.
Rattled: China’s Hardware Hack
There are more posts breaking down the language in some of the denials, but this one has the timeline.
Monday, October 8, 2018
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Why I switched from a new iPhone Xs back to an iPhone SE
The one thing that I was hoping for in the Apple iPhone announcement back in early September was an updated iPhone SE. While I'd seen enough on the Apple rumors sites to be concerned that, if the rumored updates to the iPhone SE were true, I'd probably be unhappy with that device. As it was, the rumors sites were talking about a glass-backed iPhone SE with no audio port and no home button -- but I tried to remain optimistic. I'd even considered, in the days prior to the iPhone Xs announcement, purchasing a 128GB iPhone SE just so that I'd have a new one without 2 years of wear and tear on it.
Don't get me wrong, my iPhone SE is still a great phone that still only shows minor scrapes and scratches despite two years of life without a case.
At the same time, you couldn't help but notice the better image quality from her iPhone 8. It didn't help that there were three little spots that I kept seeing in my photos, imperfections that I came to realize was probably the result of damage to the camera lens.
With the iPhone Xs announcement, I'd hoped that Apple would, at least, continue to sell the iPhone SE - dated as it is/was. Seeing it EOLed was probably the worst aspect of that announcement.
So, grudgingly, when orders opened up for the new iPhone Xs back in September, I ordered one. It sounds like a simple decision, a simple action, but it was something more. At the time, I rationalized my decision a couple of ways.
First, I told myself that I'm adept enough with electronics that I could overcome the failures of the design in the iPhone Xs. After all, I thought, how bad could it be? I was sure that, while it might be mildly frustrating at times, I would be able to use the device and would benefit from the new camera. What was surprising was how wrong that prediction turned out to be.
From a size standpoint, I thought the iPhone Xs would end up being about the same size as the iPhone 8. Having used an iPhone 6s Plus for a year, I knew that that phone was just way too big, but I was under the impression that the iPhone X brought something close to a "Plus" size screen into the smaller non-plus sized body. While I knew that it would be larger, I wasn't prepared for how large the iPhone Xs turned out to be.
This week, after almost three weeks of using the iPhone Xs, I switched my phone back to my iPhone SE.
As I used the iPhone Xs, a number of issues because clear. First, while the whole notion of Face ID seemed like an idiotic authentication interface to me, in practice, it proved worse. While I'd initially been impressed with it's ability to recognize me and unlock the device -- almost like it authenticated without effort -- as I used it day-in-and-day-out, I began to notice that it seemed like it failed more often than it succeeded. Running the out-of-the-box software configuration, Face ID fails when you're wearing sunglasses. In other words, when you're using the device outside, you have to stop what you're doing, lift up your sunglasses and force the device to authenticate. It's worth noting that the fingerprint sensor on my iPhone SE worked equally well inside and outside, without regard to whether you were wearing sunglasses.
Face ID also often failed to work if I tried to access my iPhone while it was sitting on my desk in front of me, at a table in a restaurant or a number of other locations that I tried to casually access my iPhone from.
So, imagine yourself at lunch with a colleague and you hear your phone chime indicating that you'd received a text. With iOS 12, the default information displayed on the lock screen is that your received a message from a specified contact. In order to view that on the iPhone Xs, you have to pick up your phone and look at it, something that can be disruptive and be perceived as rude. In contrast, with the fingerprint ID, you can simply touch your iPhone, look down, and you can see whether the text is important or not.
I can't tell you how many times I repeatedly went through scenarios similar to this, particularly since, for many text messages, all you really need to do is determine whether the message is important or not. And worse, because the iPhone Xs locks quickly, you can find yourself having to repeat the whole exercise multiple times in during a single window of receiving multiple texts. It's not just bad, it's terrible.
Additionally, I thought that the lack of a headphone jack might simply be an inconvenience that I would get used to. In practice, I found that this also wasn't true. I should note that, prior to my iPhone Xs, I used my iPhone for all of my telephone communications. It's also worth noting that, while I have Apple Airpods and I use them as a Bluetooth headset when driving or some other activities, when I need to make calls where I want to ensure the audio quality of the call, I use the Apple earbuds that came with the phone. Often, sitting at my desk, I would have my iPhone SE plugged in and charging while using the earbuds for a call.
With the iPhone Xs, initially I brought the lightning based earbuds along, but I soon found myself trying to decide whether to charge the iPhone or to plug in the headset and make a call. Over nearly three weeks of use, I found myself hesitant to make phone calls. Eventually, I put my Lighting earbuds into my backpack and only took them out once or twice. Essentially, whether it was just psychological or practical, I realized that my iPhone Xs was barely functioning as a phone.
Another aspect that anticipated how much of a problem it would be was the lack of a home button. I wish I could tell you how many times I used a "Sweep Up" gesture on the device with no results. It doesn't just fail once or twice, I would estimate the failure rate at greater than 20%. You might argue that the case is a contributing factor, but I don't think that's actually the case. This failure to function has a significant impact on how well the device functions day to day. For example, if you have a problematic app and you want to "double-tap" the home button in order to bring up the multi-task screen and kill the app, you may find yourself trying for 20-30 seconds before getting the interface to change. That's just one example. It happened more frequently than I would have imagined, ane particularly frustrating if you're trying to do something like kill an app.
----
So, after a particularly frustrating round of receiving texts on my iPhone Xs and wrestling with the device functionality just to access them, I decided that I was done with it -- that I was going to switch back to my iPhone SE. I figured that I could simply carry the iPhone Xs around, using it for it's camera functionality and, since it was sometimes convenient to have the larger display, use it as a wifi-based device when I needed the larger display. If I need network access, I could simply use my iPhone SE to create a hotspot for the Xs.
I wish I could share with you the immense sense of joy that I felt once I switched back. Holding the smaller device in my hand brought me an unexpected sense of elation.
At this point, I've been back on my iPhone SE for a couple of days and I'm much happier. The iPhone Xs is sort of like having a pocket-sized iPad. At this point, give me old, obsolete Apple over the new Apple. Whether you want to blame it on Tim Cook, elements in the org further down, or something else, the company is just not doing design and functionality the way that they used to.
Don't get me wrong, my iPhone SE is still a great phone that still only shows minor scrapes and scratches despite two years of life without a case.
At the same time, you couldn't help but notice the better image quality from her iPhone 8. It didn't help that there were three little spots that I kept seeing in my photos, imperfections that I came to realize was probably the result of damage to the camera lens.
With the iPhone Xs announcement, I'd hoped that Apple would, at least, continue to sell the iPhone SE - dated as it is/was. Seeing it EOLed was probably the worst aspect of that announcement.
So, grudgingly, when orders opened up for the new iPhone Xs back in September, I ordered one. It sounds like a simple decision, a simple action, but it was something more. At the time, I rationalized my decision a couple of ways.
First, I told myself that I'm adept enough with electronics that I could overcome the failures of the design in the iPhone Xs. After all, I thought, how bad could it be? I was sure that, while it might be mildly frustrating at times, I would be able to use the device and would benefit from the new camera. What was surprising was how wrong that prediction turned out to be.
From a size standpoint, I thought the iPhone Xs would end up being about the same size as the iPhone 8. Having used an iPhone 6s Plus for a year, I knew that that phone was just way too big, but I was under the impression that the iPhone X brought something close to a "Plus" size screen into the smaller non-plus sized body. While I knew that it would be larger, I wasn't prepared for how large the iPhone Xs turned out to be.
This week, after almost three weeks of using the iPhone Xs, I switched my phone back to my iPhone SE.
As I used the iPhone Xs, a number of issues because clear. First, while the whole notion of Face ID seemed like an idiotic authentication interface to me, in practice, it proved worse. While I'd initially been impressed with it's ability to recognize me and unlock the device -- almost like it authenticated without effort -- as I used it day-in-and-day-out, I began to notice that it seemed like it failed more often than it succeeded. Running the out-of-the-box software configuration, Face ID fails when you're wearing sunglasses. In other words, when you're using the device outside, you have to stop what you're doing, lift up your sunglasses and force the device to authenticate. It's worth noting that the fingerprint sensor on my iPhone SE worked equally well inside and outside, without regard to whether you were wearing sunglasses.
Face ID also often failed to work if I tried to access my iPhone while it was sitting on my desk in front of me, at a table in a restaurant or a number of other locations that I tried to casually access my iPhone from.
So, imagine yourself at lunch with a colleague and you hear your phone chime indicating that you'd received a text. With iOS 12, the default information displayed on the lock screen is that your received a message from a specified contact. In order to view that on the iPhone Xs, you have to pick up your phone and look at it, something that can be disruptive and be perceived as rude. In contrast, with the fingerprint ID, you can simply touch your iPhone, look down, and you can see whether the text is important or not.
I can't tell you how many times I repeatedly went through scenarios similar to this, particularly since, for many text messages, all you really need to do is determine whether the message is important or not. And worse, because the iPhone Xs locks quickly, you can find yourself having to repeat the whole exercise multiple times in during a single window of receiving multiple texts. It's not just bad, it's terrible.
Additionally, I thought that the lack of a headphone jack might simply be an inconvenience that I would get used to. In practice, I found that this also wasn't true. I should note that, prior to my iPhone Xs, I used my iPhone for all of my telephone communications. It's also worth noting that, while I have Apple Airpods and I use them as a Bluetooth headset when driving or some other activities, when I need to make calls where I want to ensure the audio quality of the call, I use the Apple earbuds that came with the phone. Often, sitting at my desk, I would have my iPhone SE plugged in and charging while using the earbuds for a call.
With the iPhone Xs, initially I brought the lightning based earbuds along, but I soon found myself trying to decide whether to charge the iPhone or to plug in the headset and make a call. Over nearly three weeks of use, I found myself hesitant to make phone calls. Eventually, I put my Lighting earbuds into my backpack and only took them out once or twice. Essentially, whether it was just psychological or practical, I realized that my iPhone Xs was barely functioning as a phone.
Another aspect that anticipated how much of a problem it would be was the lack of a home button. I wish I could tell you how many times I used a "Sweep Up" gesture on the device with no results. It doesn't just fail once or twice, I would estimate the failure rate at greater than 20%. You might argue that the case is a contributing factor, but I don't think that's actually the case. This failure to function has a significant impact on how well the device functions day to day. For example, if you have a problematic app and you want to "double-tap" the home button in order to bring up the multi-task screen and kill the app, you may find yourself trying for 20-30 seconds before getting the interface to change. That's just one example. It happened more frequently than I would have imagined, ane particularly frustrating if you're trying to do something like kill an app.
----
So, after a particularly frustrating round of receiving texts on my iPhone Xs and wrestling with the device functionality just to access them, I decided that I was done with it -- that I was going to switch back to my iPhone SE. I figured that I could simply carry the iPhone Xs around, using it for it's camera functionality and, since it was sometimes convenient to have the larger display, use it as a wifi-based device when I needed the larger display. If I need network access, I could simply use my iPhone SE to create a hotspot for the Xs.
I wish I could share with you the immense sense of joy that I felt once I switched back. Holding the smaller device in my hand brought me an unexpected sense of elation.
At this point, I've been back on my iPhone SE for a couple of days and I'm much happier. The iPhone Xs is sort of like having a pocket-sized iPad. At this point, give me old, obsolete Apple over the new Apple. Whether you want to blame it on Tim Cook, elements in the org further down, or something else, the company is just not doing design and functionality the way that they used to.
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Has Your Electronic Hardware Been Hacked?
This is something that you should read. The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies is a story from Bloomberg Businessweek about SuperMicro server motherboards being hacked by the Chinese military, adding a hardware device to the board enabling access to the server. The hardware device was designed to look like an innocuous component, and the compromised servers may have gone to companies like Apple and Amazon, into their AWS cloud.
If you're looking for more analysis, here's a Techcrunch post on the article.
Needless to say, these are worth your time to read.
If you're looking for more analysis, here's a Techcrunch post on the article.
Needless to say, these are worth your time to read.
Monday, September 24, 2018
I got an iPhone Xs. I hate it.
So I've written a number of posts on Twitter talking about the recent Apple product announcements and how the company has quit designing phones that match my needs. I was particularly disappointed with the recent announcements when they EOLed the iPhone SE. For the past two years, I've been using a 64GB iPhone SE, the best iPhone I could get when the iPhone 7 came out and Apple abandoned the headphone jack.
For the past two years, I've used the iPhone SE. While the smaller display can be frustrating at times, I think that most of my frustration with the display was that Apple has designed the software for much larger screens. Even while they claim the UI is responsive and can adapt to screen size changes, it turned out that changing that setting in iOS 11 and making the type and interface larger caused significant performance issues on iPhone SE. Apple Support helped me diagnose that back in March of this year.
After two years using my iPhone SE, it's still a great phone, but it's been wrestling with a few small issues. What we noticed the most was the significant difference in the camera performance between the iPhone SE and my wife's iPhone 8. In addition to the photos on the iPhone SE not having anywhere near the clarity of those shot on the iPhone 8, my iPhone SE has picked up a few blemishes on the camera lens that shows up as spots on photos. Normally, I might not care -- at least, I wouldn't care enough to downgrade and loose my headphone jack -- but as noted in a previous post, we have a two-year old son that we like to take lots of picture of. When you have to wait to get someone else's phone to take a picture (or it goes to sleep and you need to re-authenticate), it sucks. This is what drove me into an iPhone Xs purchase.
My new iPhone Xs arrived on Friday, and I've used it over the weekend. As noted in the title, I hate it.
Before I tell you about all of the ways that I hate it, in keeping with one of my college writing classes, I'll start by saying something nice about it. Something I like. The camera. It's great. While it's possible to manipulate your images in Photoshop to match the portrait mode effects, the iPhone Xs captures these kinds images simply and easily. It really works well. The shots are beautiful.
Other things that I've found to be nice about the iPhone Xs -- Face ID works better than I expected. Often, if the iPhone is looking at you, Face ID will unlock the device. That being said, if I'm wearing sunglasses (like when I'm using the iPhone outside at the farmer's market), it won't work unless I lift up my sunglasses. It also doesn't like it when the device is laying on the table, looking up at me. This seems even more problematic when I'm wearing glasses. In short, for all of the times when it knows me, there are many annoying times when it doesn't. In general, my fingerprint worked better (it only failed when my hands were wet or when the sensor got dirty).
Now, let's get to the things about the iPhone Xs that suck.
It's really big. It's been a while since I had the iPhone 6s Plus, but the iPhone Xs feels big like that. And this is the smaller device. Imagine how big the Max must feel. In short, the iPhone Xs has the same problem that I had with the iPhone 6s Plus -- it's too damned big.
For comparison, here are the two versions when I hold them in my hand.
While it may not seem like much of a difference from the images, you can kind of see how much more open my hand is holding the iPhone XS. In real world interaction, this translates into less grip on the phone and, from my previous experience, a greater likelihood of drops. It also makes it extremely difficult to use the device with one hand. In contrast, with my SE, I can spin the device around in my hand without really loosing my grip on it.
You know what's even better than an iPhone that's so big, it's difficult to hold onto? Making the iPhone enclosure almost entirely of glass. Take a look at a couple photos of my iPhone SE.
I've been using this device for two years without a case. As you can see, it has sustained a few drops. What I've highlighted with these two photos are two corners of the iPhone where you can see that the phone took a pretty significant impact. In the top corner photo, it hit the asphalt so hard that it took a big cut out of the metal. Rather than leaving a sharp edge, I used a nail file to smooth the metal, something that required me to sand it down below the surface metal to the red material below.
Would an iPhone XS survive these kinds of impacts? In a case, perhaps, but a bare iPhone Xs? I'd bet not.
I don't think that I'm particularly hard on my devices. I would consider this normal wear and tear. But it does give you a sense of the design priorities driving Apple's iPhones these days.
So, let's move on to more things that suck.
All things charging suck. Pick a topic - wireless charging? I don't have it, haven't imagined I'd need it, nor would I have ever traded my metal enclosure for it -- or the headaches associated with another glass-backed iPhone. There was a reason why the iPhone 5 was a huge improvement over the iPhone 4.
But beyond the glass, why should I have to go out and spend another $50+ for a wireless charging mat when the only thing I can charge with it is this stupid iPhone - particularly when I can just as easily guarantee that the device is being charged when I plug it in.
Then there's the BS "fast charging" feature. Note that this only works IF, you spend another $60 with Apple to buy their more powerful charging brick and another $30 for their USB-C to Lightning cable, neither of which are useful to me or anything other than fast charging the stupid phone.
But don't get me wrong, after I experienced half a day of battery drain on Saturday, I considered fast charging. It's probably worth some analysis and comparison, but if I didn't know any better, I'd almost think that Apple slowed the regular charging speed on the iPhone Xs -- even using the iPad charger, it charges painfully slow and the battery usage seems high.
What else sucks about the iPhone Xs?
No home button really sucks. Yeah, they've figured out a way to make the interface run without a home button, but it doesn't work well. Essentially, sliding up from the bottom edge of the screen is supposed to equal a home button. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There are times I've had to make 3 or 4 swipes up just to get the interface to do what it's suppose to.
Perhaps the bump created by the bottom edge of the case makes your finger skip, but would you even consider carrying this expensive piece of glass without a case?
The other thing that comes into play with the iPhone Xs is, since there isn't a home button, it wants to wake up whenever you touch the phone or it moves. This leads to lots of false wake-ups. At the same time, whenever it wakes up, it also starts to look for your face -- I suspect that this may contribute to why it seems like the battery drains as fast as it does. Maybe it's just me (or maybe it's the default auto-lock setting on this device), but it also seems like it goes to sleep faster than it did previously. Maybe that's a feature to highlight how well their Face ID works.
It goes without saying that the lack of a headphone jack also sucks. First, there was the "I need to carry two pairs of headphones with me to work today, one for this stupid iPhone Xs, and one for everything else." Then, when I got to work, I plugged my iPhone in to recharge from listening to streaming audio on the way in during the commute. I briefly thought about listening while I recharged the iPhone, something I could have done in the past, but quickly remember that I can't do that on this stupid iPhone.
Bottom line -- yeah, it sucks. It sucks, but the camera is great.
At this point, I've considered switching back to my iPhone SE as my primary phone, disabling the cellular on the iPhone Xs and just using it as a camera. It's a difficult decision, but it seems like the kind of decision that Apple is forcing us to make these days. In the same way, caught between choosing a new Macbook Pro or a refurbished pre-USB-C version late last year, we opted to buy Apple products that were, essentially, three years old. It really says something about the state of Apple, doesn't it.
For the past two years, I've used the iPhone SE. While the smaller display can be frustrating at times, I think that most of my frustration with the display was that Apple has designed the software for much larger screens. Even while they claim the UI is responsive and can adapt to screen size changes, it turned out that changing that setting in iOS 11 and making the type and interface larger caused significant performance issues on iPhone SE. Apple Support helped me diagnose that back in March of this year.
After two years using my iPhone SE, it's still a great phone, but it's been wrestling with a few small issues. What we noticed the most was the significant difference in the camera performance between the iPhone SE and my wife's iPhone 8. In addition to the photos on the iPhone SE not having anywhere near the clarity of those shot on the iPhone 8, my iPhone SE has picked up a few blemishes on the camera lens that shows up as spots on photos. Normally, I might not care -- at least, I wouldn't care enough to downgrade and loose my headphone jack -- but as noted in a previous post, we have a two-year old son that we like to take lots of picture of. When you have to wait to get someone else's phone to take a picture (or it goes to sleep and you need to re-authenticate), it sucks. This is what drove me into an iPhone Xs purchase.
My new iPhone Xs arrived on Friday, and I've used it over the weekend. As noted in the title, I hate it.
Before I tell you about all of the ways that I hate it, in keeping with one of my college writing classes, I'll start by saying something nice about it. Something I like. The camera. It's great. While it's possible to manipulate your images in Photoshop to match the portrait mode effects, the iPhone Xs captures these kinds images simply and easily. It really works well. The shots are beautiful.
Other things that I've found to be nice about the iPhone Xs -- Face ID works better than I expected. Often, if the iPhone is looking at you, Face ID will unlock the device. That being said, if I'm wearing sunglasses (like when I'm using the iPhone outside at the farmer's market), it won't work unless I lift up my sunglasses. It also doesn't like it when the device is laying on the table, looking up at me. This seems even more problematic when I'm wearing glasses. In short, for all of the times when it knows me, there are many annoying times when it doesn't. In general, my fingerprint worked better (it only failed when my hands were wet or when the sensor got dirty).
Now, let's get to the things about the iPhone Xs that suck.
It's really big. It's been a while since I had the iPhone 6s Plus, but the iPhone Xs feels big like that. And this is the smaller device. Imagine how big the Max must feel. In short, the iPhone Xs has the same problem that I had with the iPhone 6s Plus -- it's too damned big.
For comparison, here are the two versions when I hold them in my hand.
 |
| Holding the iPhone SE - front facing |
 |
| Holding the iPhone Xs - front facing |
 |
| Holding the iPhone SE - side view |
 |
| Holding the iPhone Xs - side view |
While it may not seem like much of a difference from the images, you can kind of see how much more open my hand is holding the iPhone XS. In real world interaction, this translates into less grip on the phone and, from my previous experience, a greater likelihood of drops. It also makes it extremely difficult to use the device with one hand. In contrast, with my SE, I can spin the device around in my hand without really loosing my grip on it.
You know what's even better than an iPhone that's so big, it's difficult to hold onto? Making the iPhone enclosure almost entirely of glass. Take a look at a couple photos of my iPhone SE.
I've been using this device for two years without a case. As you can see, it has sustained a few drops. What I've highlighted with these two photos are two corners of the iPhone where you can see that the phone took a pretty significant impact. In the top corner photo, it hit the asphalt so hard that it took a big cut out of the metal. Rather than leaving a sharp edge, I used a nail file to smooth the metal, something that required me to sand it down below the surface metal to the red material below.
Would an iPhone XS survive these kinds of impacts? In a case, perhaps, but a bare iPhone Xs? I'd bet not.
I don't think that I'm particularly hard on my devices. I would consider this normal wear and tear. But it does give you a sense of the design priorities driving Apple's iPhones these days.
So, let's move on to more things that suck.
All things charging suck. Pick a topic - wireless charging? I don't have it, haven't imagined I'd need it, nor would I have ever traded my metal enclosure for it -- or the headaches associated with another glass-backed iPhone. There was a reason why the iPhone 5 was a huge improvement over the iPhone 4.
But beyond the glass, why should I have to go out and spend another $50+ for a wireless charging mat when the only thing I can charge with it is this stupid iPhone - particularly when I can just as easily guarantee that the device is being charged when I plug it in.
Then there's the BS "fast charging" feature. Note that this only works IF, you spend another $60 with Apple to buy their more powerful charging brick and another $30 for their USB-C to Lightning cable, neither of which are useful to me or anything other than fast charging the stupid phone.
But don't get me wrong, after I experienced half a day of battery drain on Saturday, I considered fast charging. It's probably worth some analysis and comparison, but if I didn't know any better, I'd almost think that Apple slowed the regular charging speed on the iPhone Xs -- even using the iPad charger, it charges painfully slow and the battery usage seems high.
What else sucks about the iPhone Xs?
No home button really sucks. Yeah, they've figured out a way to make the interface run without a home button, but it doesn't work well. Essentially, sliding up from the bottom edge of the screen is supposed to equal a home button. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There are times I've had to make 3 or 4 swipes up just to get the interface to do what it's suppose to.
Perhaps the bump created by the bottom edge of the case makes your finger skip, but would you even consider carrying this expensive piece of glass without a case?
The other thing that comes into play with the iPhone Xs is, since there isn't a home button, it wants to wake up whenever you touch the phone or it moves. This leads to lots of false wake-ups. At the same time, whenever it wakes up, it also starts to look for your face -- I suspect that this may contribute to why it seems like the battery drains as fast as it does. Maybe it's just me (or maybe it's the default auto-lock setting on this device), but it also seems like it goes to sleep faster than it did previously. Maybe that's a feature to highlight how well their Face ID works.
It goes without saying that the lack of a headphone jack also sucks. First, there was the "I need to carry two pairs of headphones with me to work today, one for this stupid iPhone Xs, and one for everything else." Then, when I got to work, I plugged my iPhone in to recharge from listening to streaming audio on the way in during the commute. I briefly thought about listening while I recharged the iPhone, something I could have done in the past, but quickly remember that I can't do that on this stupid iPhone.
Bottom line -- yeah, it sucks. It sucks, but the camera is great.
At this point, I've considered switching back to my iPhone SE as my primary phone, disabling the cellular on the iPhone Xs and just using it as a camera. It's a difficult decision, but it seems like the kind of decision that Apple is forcing us to make these days. In the same way, caught between choosing a new Macbook Pro or a refurbished pre-USB-C version late last year, we opted to buy Apple products that were, essentially, three years old. It really says something about the state of Apple, doesn't it.
Monday, August 6, 2018
Why Don't Hotel Loyalty Programs Offer Family Accounts?
My wife and I both travel for business. With travel policies being what they are, different companies often have different preferences in terms of airlines and hotels. As a result, she frequently flies American Airlines while I flew United for many years (I stopped flying United after being repeatedly stuck in their crappy base level of service despite having status). As you can imagine, this often raises question marks about what airline to fly on and what hotel to stay at when we travel as a family.
To a certain extent, it's easy to correlate travel loyalty programs to individuals because the airline's business is measured by seats. One butt equals one seat equals one account. Over many years of travel, I never really questioned this idea. At the same time when it comes to travel loyalty programs, over the years, I've primarily been focused on airlines. Hotels and hotel loyalty programs have always been more of an afterthought. One key reason for this is that, while it's not too difficult to use a primary airline for your travel (assuming that they go to most of the locations that you go), your hotel options aren't going to be as clear-cut. For example, if you attend a lot of business conferences, you'll probably find them hosted at different hotel chains. If you travel somewhere like Las Vegas for an event and you stay in a casino hotel, it probably won't be in any of your hotel loyalty programs. And if you're traveling internationally or, at the other end of the spectrum, to rural locations, your hotel options may be limited. So, for me, hotel loyalty programs were always more about hoping the hotel would treat you a little better than a generic guest.
Some Airlines Offer Family Accounts
Last year, I happened to find myself booking a flight on British Airways (you might remember some of my British Airways pricing posts). At that time, I signed up for the British Airways loyalty program. In reading through their account info, I discovered that they let you sign up your entire family and accumulate miles in a pooled account. It turns out that several international airlines offer these kinds of loyalty programs. I also since learned that JetBlue has a family loyalty program, an unusual offering among domestic carriers and yet another reason to like them as an airline.
Recently, while discussing some aspects of our business travel, my wife and I began wondering if the hotels we often stay at offered family loyalty programs.
Here's the thing, when we travel together, we each can benefit from our individual airline mileage accounts. However, when we get to the hotel, only one of us can benefit. Sharing a room means that one of us loses. This year, for example, we've spent six days in Marriott properties, but my wife gets no credit for that time. In that same way, when she travels, there is no incentive for her to book a Marriott property since she won't have been credited for any of the stays that we've had as a family. In fact, you could argue that it's better for her to book stays in another hotel chain such that, when we travel as a family, we have multiple options for status-upgraded stays.
Perhaps the hotel programs look at things from the standpoint of trying to "avoid" giving out benefits to "people who haven't earned it". Perhaps they're looking at it from the perspective of "spouses don't travel for business very much" or "what's the point of incentivizing the wife we already have the business of the husband?" At the same time, if I'm a traveler with hotel chain loyalty status, what's my perception when my spouse stays at your hotel chain and receives a "lesser" experience?
In short, this lack of offering a family loyalty account at the hotel chains is a real customer relations failure on their part. This really seems like something designed in the framework of "the husband travels and works, the wife stays at home." When you break it down in that context, it seems pretty bad.
To a certain extent, it's easy to correlate travel loyalty programs to individuals because the airline's business is measured by seats. One butt equals one seat equals one account. Over many years of travel, I never really questioned this idea. At the same time when it comes to travel loyalty programs, over the years, I've primarily been focused on airlines. Hotels and hotel loyalty programs have always been more of an afterthought. One key reason for this is that, while it's not too difficult to use a primary airline for your travel (assuming that they go to most of the locations that you go), your hotel options aren't going to be as clear-cut. For example, if you attend a lot of business conferences, you'll probably find them hosted at different hotel chains. If you travel somewhere like Las Vegas for an event and you stay in a casino hotel, it probably won't be in any of your hotel loyalty programs. And if you're traveling internationally or, at the other end of the spectrum, to rural locations, your hotel options may be limited. So, for me, hotel loyalty programs were always more about hoping the hotel would treat you a little better than a generic guest.
Some Airlines Offer Family Accounts
Last year, I happened to find myself booking a flight on British Airways (you might remember some of my British Airways pricing posts). At that time, I signed up for the British Airways loyalty program. In reading through their account info, I discovered that they let you sign up your entire family and accumulate miles in a pooled account. It turns out that several international airlines offer these kinds of loyalty programs. I also since learned that JetBlue has a family loyalty program, an unusual offering among domestic carriers and yet another reason to like them as an airline.
Recently, while discussing some aspects of our business travel, my wife and I began wondering if the hotels we often stay at offered family loyalty programs.
Here's the thing, when we travel together, we each can benefit from our individual airline mileage accounts. However, when we get to the hotel, only one of us can benefit. Sharing a room means that one of us loses. This year, for example, we've spent six days in Marriott properties, but my wife gets no credit for that time. In that same way, when she travels, there is no incentive for her to book a Marriott property since she won't have been credited for any of the stays that we've had as a family. In fact, you could argue that it's better for her to book stays in another hotel chain such that, when we travel as a family, we have multiple options for status-upgraded stays.
Perhaps the hotel programs look at things from the standpoint of trying to "avoid" giving out benefits to "people who haven't earned it". Perhaps they're looking at it from the perspective of "spouses don't travel for business very much" or "what's the point of incentivizing the wife we already have the business of the husband?" At the same time, if I'm a traveler with hotel chain loyalty status, what's my perception when my spouse stays at your hotel chain and receives a "lesser" experience?
In short, this lack of offering a family loyalty account at the hotel chains is a real customer relations failure on their part. This really seems like something designed in the framework of "the husband travels and works, the wife stays at home." When you break it down in that context, it seems pretty bad.
Monday, July 30, 2018
The Intersection Between Branding, Internal Marketing and Employee Communications
Recently, I learned about a company that had hired an outside consulting business to work with it's management and employees in an effort to improve communications and the inter-working relationships in the organization. These outside consultant things always remind me of that part of the movie Office Space where they bring in "the Bobs" and the employees are asked about what they do.
For many that go through this, it's hard to escape an unspoken level of silliness and absurdity -- it's like the company trying to apply a topical medicine (like Neosporin) to fix a deeper, more involved sickness, like depression or pneumonia.
But there's another part of this equation that gets hidden, swept over by the decorum of not being to vocal or outspoken in the face of management when they hold the purse strings of your livelihood (or the other aspects of the culture that drove the idea of the consultant group in the first place). In essence, this is brand alignment problem.
Brand Alignment in the Context of Employees
You can find a lot of definitions and explanations of brand alignment with a quick Google search. In essence though, brand alignment is all about being what you say you are. For example, if your message is that your products are high quality goods, but in reality, your products are poorly manufactured and often break, you have a brand alignment problem. It's an inconsistency between message and factual reality.
The most fundamental aspect of this brand alignment equation that you have to understand is, there is no escaping reality, no escaping the truth that lives outside of the message. You can scream and shout, pay for massive advertising, social, viral, guerilla, -- choose your marketing buzzword, it doesn't matter -- if your products are poor quality, the reality of your brand identity will not be "quality products". In short, a key component of brand alignment is about what you do, not what you say.
Another important aspect of brand alignment is the idea that employees are essential to expressing the company's brand, that in their interaction with customers and the rest of the world, employees are the ambassadors and evangelists for your brand. In that respect, you'll find a number of brand alignment posts that talk about how important it is for companies to provide brand training to their employees.
But here's the thing about training. You can teach employees your company's brand message, but if the relationship with the business isn't aligned to that message, the words are hollow. To quote three questions from this Ignyte Brands post on brand alignment:
The underlying framework of "competitive salary, competitive benefits" is an HR organization that has basically done their version of competitive research and distilled it down to a set of features that they can match without much risk. That's not product design. If I tell you that making a "Me Too" physical product won't win you any business, most people understand that. But when you put that framework around HR, compensation, hiring and retention, suddenly you'll find a lot of people claiming that business doesn't work that way.
In some respects, you can blame HR and the people that run that department for this. Human Resources is not marketing, and they're not used to looking at things through that lens. I can't tell you how many times I've had to work with HR people and, in discussing even something as straightforward as writing descriptive promotional text about the company, found them unable to to produce something more than a copy/paste version of some other company description they found. They're unable to differentiate the company or even put together a basic framework of a story about what makes the opportunity interesting and why you'd want to work there. If your HR person can't sell your company to prospective candidates, how can you expect to have success in hiring and retention?
You've Got A Lot of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend...
Human Resources is Not Your Friend
If you search this term, not only will you find numerous articles written on various aspects of this, you'll also find horror stories of people who sought help from their HR department, only to discover that the HR group was either no help, or worse.
If human resources can't position the company, if they can't produce a compelling framework for why you'll want to work there and if, in the day-to-day work environment, they are not your friend -- how can you expect them to contribute to building a culture of evangelists in your company? Cute newsletters? Internal events? Imagine trying to sell prospective hires on the unique excitement they'll experience because your company also has a summer picnic. Or hosts a pizza lunch for everyone, occasionally. Rah rah rah!
Can you see start to see the framework of issues that are potentially eroding employee enthusiasm for a company -- the elements that are contributing that brand alignment problem?
Another tool that's sometimes referenced in marketing is the Net Promoter Score. For the HR people that might be reading this, here's a link that helps explain Net Promoter Score and how it's calculated. To summarize, rating your feelings about a company on a scale from 0-10, how does the company stack up? Within that calculation, it's important to understand that 0-6 are "detractors", 7-8 are "passives" and 9-10 are "promoters". If the best you can muster from your employees is, what might seem like an average 5 or 6, those people are actually detractors. How's that "competitive salary, competitive benefits" doing for you now?
One thing that I've often heard from HR departments here in the valley is that, "we'll we can't compete with Google. We can't have our own cafeteria, laundry, etc." But the problem is, they're looking specifically at these benefits like features you might offer -- or try to match -- instead of looking at the their constituent base and identifying what would be useful and compelling for them. This is why some of the culture and compensation documents that have come out of Netflix are so interesting.
But even with individual benefits and compensation, you've created a communication framework with your employees. For example, while I've worked with organizations that negotiate a basic package of health insurance coverage and pass some percentage of those costs onto the employee. I've also worked with companies that covered 100% of health insurance costs because, as they said, these are our employees and we want to take care of them. Which message resonates better with staff? Which is more likely to be something that people might evangelize about?
What Message does your Salary and Compensation Package Communicate?
Although salary and compensation are not typically viewed in a messaging context, compensation represents a direct message of employee value by the company to the employee. That being said, many businesses expect that, by implementing a "competitive" salary framework, they have matched a feature and taken that off the table. But what about companies with salaries on the low side? Here's a quick hint, when you're interview process delivers "final stage" candidates and you're making offers -- if some percentage of them choose not to accept, you probably have a compensation problem. Going through a series of interviews is not an uninvolved process on the part of your hiring candidate, so (put in a sales and marketing context), having people drop out of the pipeline at that point should raise a flag. What's more, it should also raise flags about the people who accept -- do they feel under-compensated, but didn't negotiate well or signed on with some sense of desperation?
All that being said, you'll find studies about compensation and salary that offer a few caveats. First, while some people are particularly focused on salary, not everyone is. Additionally, I've seen another salary study that basically said, if people are paid enough, they don't really worry about salary. Rather, the key driver for them tends to be about meaningful work. In that way, I think the key thing to take away with respect to salary is that, while there is no magic bullet for communicating positively through salary and compensation, there are many potential negative messages and wrong turns that a business can make.
Negative, under-compensation messages aren't limited to hiring though. Consider the annual performance review. If the percentage increase a company awards an employee is less than the cost of inflation, the "increase" is still conveying a negative message. Remember the story of Paul Ryan tweeting about the $1.50 per week increase the secretary at a high school got from the Republican tax plan -- enough to pay her Costco membership for the year? When he read that, he was seeing "increase", but what the secretary (and the rest of the world) was writing about was the insignificance of the amount. In Net Promoter terms, she was a detractor -- moved to the point of being vocal about her dissatisfaction.
How Do You Make Employees Promoters?
First, consider the start-up. Start-ups jobs often include company equity -- stock options. In that way, most people working for start-ups are, in essence, partial owners of the company. Often, they will accept a lower salary number with the hope that their efforts will vest in a longer term, larger pay-off. To accept that position, they must buy into the idea of the company, into the potential for it's success.
Another aspect of the start-up that may be even more significant in terms of aligning employees with the company and the brand is the framework by which corporate goals are defined. For start-ups, goals are often simple, tangible, and with a clear purpose. For example, during one business review meeting at one start-up I worked at, they told us, "right now, if everything holds steady, we have enough money to keep operating through to the end of the year." Beyond the long term goal of trying to make the company successful, this set a simple framework -- find customers, grow the business, or we're out of runway.
Contrast this with the goals defined by established businesses like, "last year our business made $200 million, this year we need to make $250 million." There's no why. For the average employee, there's no clearly defined requirement to do anything different than the previous year, no driver to act. Imagine the employee that made an extra effort to help the company hit the $200 million goal -- does $250 provide any meaningful framework for matching or exceeding the efforts that they just made?
For public companies, stock purchase programs and option awards can help provide employees a sense of ownership in the company. This can help mitigate some of the emptiness of arbitrary corporate financial goals. In it's simplest sense, owning stock in the company means that, if the company is worth more, your portfolio is worth more. You own a piece of that and your efforts are an investment in making it worth more.
In this aspect, there's a correlation between the size of the company and the ease of aligning employees with organizational messages. Smaller is easier. It's a lot easier to connect and align employees with corporate goals in smaller organizations. As organizations grow, people become more removed, more alienated, more disconnected from the influence, impact, and reward loop.
It should go without saying that simply adding start-up aspects to an established company isn't a solution. A great example of this is how many established companies these days undertake initiatives to eliminate offices or cube walls. I once worked in for a business that offered stock options and entertained questions of when they were thinking about an IPO -- this was post dot.com bust. Having gone through an IPO with an earlier company, I knew that this company would never go public, but that didn't stop their management from using the whole stock-option framework to grift employees -- they even sold options to outgoing employees. If you're running a grift on employees, you're probably going to have some brand alignment problems. That being said, the employees that didn't have enough understanding to be skeptical, they were certainly excited by the "stock options".
Ultimately, the way to meaningfully connect with employees and make them Promoters is not to simply copy-paste cultural aspects and incentives onto an environment and expect people to perform. Rather, it's something that requires design thinking, something that understands the unique challenges that your business faces and building an environment that's conducive to making business operations easier and better. It's about understanding what the business machine, your business, is trying to do and optimizing everything for that. It's also about making that machine inclusive. Rather than treating employees as cogs or dumb components, think of them as smart components with sensors and intelligence. Or better yet, think of them as people, people who, if they believe in a goal, will make an extra effort to help achieve that goal.
That makes the framework pretty simple. You need to define believable, meaningful goals, and you need to build an environment where people believe you're taking their interests into consideration.
For many that go through this, it's hard to escape an unspoken level of silliness and absurdity -- it's like the company trying to apply a topical medicine (like Neosporin) to fix a deeper, more involved sickness, like depression or pneumonia.
But there's another part of this equation that gets hidden, swept over by the decorum of not being to vocal or outspoken in the face of management when they hold the purse strings of your livelihood (or the other aspects of the culture that drove the idea of the consultant group in the first place). In essence, this is brand alignment problem.
Brand Alignment in the Context of Employees
You can find a lot of definitions and explanations of brand alignment with a quick Google search. In essence though, brand alignment is all about being what you say you are. For example, if your message is that your products are high quality goods, but in reality, your products are poorly manufactured and often break, you have a brand alignment problem. It's an inconsistency between message and factual reality.
The most fundamental aspect of this brand alignment equation that you have to understand is, there is no escaping reality, no escaping the truth that lives outside of the message. You can scream and shout, pay for massive advertising, social, viral, guerilla, -- choose your marketing buzzword, it doesn't matter -- if your products are poor quality, the reality of your brand identity will not be "quality products". In short, a key component of brand alignment is about what you do, not what you say.
Another important aspect of brand alignment is the idea that employees are essential to expressing the company's brand, that in their interaction with customers and the rest of the world, employees are the ambassadors and evangelists for your brand. In that respect, you'll find a number of brand alignment posts that talk about how important it is for companies to provide brand training to their employees.
But here's the thing about training. You can teach employees your company's brand message, but if the relationship with the business isn't aligned to that message, the words are hollow. To quote three questions from this Ignyte Brands post on brand alignment:
Do my employees feel appreciated? Are they invested in the success of the brand? And, most importantly, do they feel like an integral part of the brand story?This essential element of brand alignment may be one of the most underappreciated, misunderstood aspects of branding and brand identity. Not just that, but it probably provides some key insight into whether a business is performing at it's full potential. Consider, apathetic employees may "meet expectations" and execute their duties within the framework of the required tasks, but uninspiring environments are not going to motivate them to go above and beyond. And, if the business' relationship with employees is simply "competitive salary, competitive benefits", don't kid yourself into thinking that this is operating as an effective motivation engine for brand enthusiasm.
The underlying framework of "competitive salary, competitive benefits" is an HR organization that has basically done their version of competitive research and distilled it down to a set of features that they can match without much risk. That's not product design. If I tell you that making a "Me Too" physical product won't win you any business, most people understand that. But when you put that framework around HR, compensation, hiring and retention, suddenly you'll find a lot of people claiming that business doesn't work that way.
In some respects, you can blame HR and the people that run that department for this. Human Resources is not marketing, and they're not used to looking at things through that lens. I can't tell you how many times I've had to work with HR people and, in discussing even something as straightforward as writing descriptive promotional text about the company, found them unable to to produce something more than a copy/paste version of some other company description they found. They're unable to differentiate the company or even put together a basic framework of a story about what makes the opportunity interesting and why you'd want to work there. If your HR person can't sell your company to prospective candidates, how can you expect to have success in hiring and retention?
You've Got A Lot of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend...
Human Resources is Not Your Friend
If you search this term, not only will you find numerous articles written on various aspects of this, you'll also find horror stories of people who sought help from their HR department, only to discover that the HR group was either no help, or worse.
If human resources can't position the company, if they can't produce a compelling framework for why you'll want to work there and if, in the day-to-day work environment, they are not your friend -- how can you expect them to contribute to building a culture of evangelists in your company? Cute newsletters? Internal events? Imagine trying to sell prospective hires on the unique excitement they'll experience because your company also has a summer picnic. Or hosts a pizza lunch for everyone, occasionally. Rah rah rah!
Can you see start to see the framework of issues that are potentially eroding employee enthusiasm for a company -- the elements that are contributing that brand alignment problem?
Another tool that's sometimes referenced in marketing is the Net Promoter Score. For the HR people that might be reading this, here's a link that helps explain Net Promoter Score and how it's calculated. To summarize, rating your feelings about a company on a scale from 0-10, how does the company stack up? Within that calculation, it's important to understand that 0-6 are "detractors", 7-8 are "passives" and 9-10 are "promoters". If the best you can muster from your employees is, what might seem like an average 5 or 6, those people are actually detractors. How's that "competitive salary, competitive benefits" doing for you now?
One thing that I've often heard from HR departments here in the valley is that, "we'll we can't compete with Google. We can't have our own cafeteria, laundry, etc." But the problem is, they're looking specifically at these benefits like features you might offer -- or try to match -- instead of looking at the their constituent base and identifying what would be useful and compelling for them. This is why some of the culture and compensation documents that have come out of Netflix are so interesting.
But even with individual benefits and compensation, you've created a communication framework with your employees. For example, while I've worked with organizations that negotiate a basic package of health insurance coverage and pass some percentage of those costs onto the employee. I've also worked with companies that covered 100% of health insurance costs because, as they said, these are our employees and we want to take care of them. Which message resonates better with staff? Which is more likely to be something that people might evangelize about?
What Message does your Salary and Compensation Package Communicate?
Although salary and compensation are not typically viewed in a messaging context, compensation represents a direct message of employee value by the company to the employee. That being said, many businesses expect that, by implementing a "competitive" salary framework, they have matched a feature and taken that off the table. But what about companies with salaries on the low side? Here's a quick hint, when you're interview process delivers "final stage" candidates and you're making offers -- if some percentage of them choose not to accept, you probably have a compensation problem. Going through a series of interviews is not an uninvolved process on the part of your hiring candidate, so (put in a sales and marketing context), having people drop out of the pipeline at that point should raise a flag. What's more, it should also raise flags about the people who accept -- do they feel under-compensated, but didn't negotiate well or signed on with some sense of desperation?
All that being said, you'll find studies about compensation and salary that offer a few caveats. First, while some people are particularly focused on salary, not everyone is. Additionally, I've seen another salary study that basically said, if people are paid enough, they don't really worry about salary. Rather, the key driver for them tends to be about meaningful work. In that way, I think the key thing to take away with respect to salary is that, while there is no magic bullet for communicating positively through salary and compensation, there are many potential negative messages and wrong turns that a business can make.
Negative, under-compensation messages aren't limited to hiring though. Consider the annual performance review. If the percentage increase a company awards an employee is less than the cost of inflation, the "increase" is still conveying a negative message. Remember the story of Paul Ryan tweeting about the $1.50 per week increase the secretary at a high school got from the Republican tax plan -- enough to pay her Costco membership for the year? When he read that, he was seeing "increase", but what the secretary (and the rest of the world) was writing about was the insignificance of the amount. In Net Promoter terms, she was a detractor -- moved to the point of being vocal about her dissatisfaction.
How Do You Make Employees Promoters?
First, consider the start-up. Start-ups jobs often include company equity -- stock options. In that way, most people working for start-ups are, in essence, partial owners of the company. Often, they will accept a lower salary number with the hope that their efforts will vest in a longer term, larger pay-off. To accept that position, they must buy into the idea of the company, into the potential for it's success.
Another aspect of the start-up that may be even more significant in terms of aligning employees with the company and the brand is the framework by which corporate goals are defined. For start-ups, goals are often simple, tangible, and with a clear purpose. For example, during one business review meeting at one start-up I worked at, they told us, "right now, if everything holds steady, we have enough money to keep operating through to the end of the year." Beyond the long term goal of trying to make the company successful, this set a simple framework -- find customers, grow the business, or we're out of runway.
Contrast this with the goals defined by established businesses like, "last year our business made $200 million, this year we need to make $250 million." There's no why. For the average employee, there's no clearly defined requirement to do anything different than the previous year, no driver to act. Imagine the employee that made an extra effort to help the company hit the $200 million goal -- does $250 provide any meaningful framework for matching or exceeding the efforts that they just made?
For public companies, stock purchase programs and option awards can help provide employees a sense of ownership in the company. This can help mitigate some of the emptiness of arbitrary corporate financial goals. In it's simplest sense, owning stock in the company means that, if the company is worth more, your portfolio is worth more. You own a piece of that and your efforts are an investment in making it worth more.
In this aspect, there's a correlation between the size of the company and the ease of aligning employees with organizational messages. Smaller is easier. It's a lot easier to connect and align employees with corporate goals in smaller organizations. As organizations grow, people become more removed, more alienated, more disconnected from the influence, impact, and reward loop.
It should go without saying that simply adding start-up aspects to an established company isn't a solution. A great example of this is how many established companies these days undertake initiatives to eliminate offices or cube walls. I once worked in for a business that offered stock options and entertained questions of when they were thinking about an IPO -- this was post dot.com bust. Having gone through an IPO with an earlier company, I knew that this company would never go public, but that didn't stop their management from using the whole stock-option framework to grift employees -- they even sold options to outgoing employees. If you're running a grift on employees, you're probably going to have some brand alignment problems. That being said, the employees that didn't have enough understanding to be skeptical, they were certainly excited by the "stock options".
Ultimately, the way to meaningfully connect with employees and make them Promoters is not to simply copy-paste cultural aspects and incentives onto an environment and expect people to perform. Rather, it's something that requires design thinking, something that understands the unique challenges that your business faces and building an environment that's conducive to making business operations easier and better. It's about understanding what the business machine, your business, is trying to do and optimizing everything for that. It's also about making that machine inclusive. Rather than treating employees as cogs or dumb components, think of them as smart components with sensors and intelligence. Or better yet, think of them as people, people who, if they believe in a goal, will make an extra effort to help achieve that goal.
That makes the framework pretty simple. You need to define believable, meaningful goals, and you need to build an environment where people believe you're taking their interests into consideration.
Monday, July 23, 2018
Salesforce.com Brand Identity in Conflict over Relationship with US Customs & Border Protection
If you've seen any Salesforce company presentation over the years, you'll most certainly have seen them promote their corporate culture of philanthropy, community and equality. Not only do they frequently promote aspects of these values at Salesforce events (from their work with non-profits to their community service efforts), CEO Marc Benioff got a lot of visibility in recent years directing the company's stance on gender equality and gay rights in a fight against some repressive state laws. But now Salesforce's idealistic brand identity is coming into conflict over it's relationship with US Customs and Border Protection.
This story from Gizmodo, Salesforce Faces Boycott Threat as RAICES Rejects $250,000 Donation Over CBP Contract, has a great overview of the controversy.
This will be an interesting one to watch and see how it plays out.
This story from Gizmodo, Salesforce Faces Boycott Threat as RAICES Rejects $250,000 Donation Over CBP Contract, has a great overview of the controversy.
This will be an interesting one to watch and see how it plays out.
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