Monthly Archives: January 2009

Change

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Haven’t we been here before? I’ll bet you thought I was going to write about the new administration didn’t you. After all, never in the history of politics (where the more things “change” the more they stay the same) has “change” been more heralded.

Nope.

Today we are going to talk about Pepsi™.

Three of my two favorite beverages, Diet Pepsi™, Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi™, and Tropicana™ Pure Premium Orange Juice, have significantly changed their appearance on the grocery store shelf.

I didn’t like it.

I thought I didn’t like it only because it was difficult for both Anne and me to find the bottle on the shelf. Forest : trees, innit. That’s the old-fogey response except I have to think that, if it is more difficult for me to find the product, it is more difficult for every other buyer to find the product on the shelf.

That seems counter productive.

The Hawthorne effect describes how you change your behavior in response to a change in your environment. The name comes from a series of experiments with telephone relay assemblers at the Hawthorne Works, a manufacturer near Chicago, that began in the 1920s.

The Hawthorne experiments had many facets, most of which counted the number of relays each worker finished and dropped in a chute. Over the years the researchers changed pretty much everything that could impact the workers from payroll frequency to break time to the lighting in the test room.

I particularly remember the lighting.

See, the researchers changed the assembly room lighting and productivity went up. After a while, they changed the lighting back and productivity went up. Again.

That experiment told us for the first time that making a change–any change–can alter peoples’ behavior.

Tropicana™ dropped the long-famous orange-with-a-straw logo in favor of a stemware glass and a squared-off, formal typeface. The carton looks more … generic now.

I doubt that was the intent.

Pepsi-Cola™ has unveiled a new face several times in the past couple of decades, starting with a logo change that the company thought was “younger looking” than Coke’s antiquated script. The company has since changed the swoops and the design on the bottles a few times leading up to the most recent major color change. Diet Pepsi™, which I drink before five in the afternoon, was once in a primarily blue bottle. It is now in a silver bottle that looks brownish in soft light. Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi™, which I drink after five that I might sleep at night, was once in a mostly tan bottle. It is now in a white bottle that looks vaguely blueish in soft light.

Those new bottles look so different, they force a rote buyer to search all the product in the soda aisle to find them. That means the rote buyer no longer makes his or her choice automatically but considers all the other products Pepsi™ sells. I looked for the first time in quite a while at the Max™, the Wild Cherries™, the Jazz™, and even the Caramel™. Caramel?

Huh.

I guess the change worked. The new bottle design means I really did look at every one of the Pepsi™ bottles on the shelf. Unfortunately, I had also looked at every one of the Canada Dry™ products, the Schweppes™ products, and even the Coke™ products thinking perhaps someone had pulled an unconscionable switch.

Overall, perhaps the change is good. I did relearn about all the different flavors (Caramel?) and it did not drive me to sample the offerings from the competitors. It might just attract the eye of new buyers who very well might try the taste. That is the game: keep your current customers happy with the taste and find new markets with the advertising. And the packaging.

After all that bottle lugging I’m suddenly thirsty.

It is worth noting in the small print that, although both Tropicana™ and all the Pepsi™ beverages mentioned are Pepsico units and that I do own Pepsico stock, there was no product placement payment for this column.

Singing Pigs

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Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.”

The Congressional Budget Office is the de facto standard by both tradition and enforcement to provide all Congressional economic data. It was created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

It is interesting to note that CBO’s budget projection rules require their economists to assume that federal laws and policies governing both spending and taxation will not change.

Acting Director Robert A. Sunshine delivered a stunning forecast to Congress on January 8:

  • A slow recovery in 2010, with real GDP growing by only 1.5 percent.
  • An unemployment rate that will exceed 9 percent early in 2010.
  • A continued decline in inflation, both because energy prices have been falling and because inflation excluding energy and food prices—the core rate—tends to ease during and immediately after a recession; for 2009, CBO anticipates that inflation, as measured by the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U), will be only 0.1 percent.
  • A decrease of more than 1 percent in real consumption in 2009, followed by moderate growth in 2010; the rise in unemployment, the loss of wealth, and tight consumer credit will continue to restrain consumption—although lower commodity prices will ease those effects somewhat.

Most important, “CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II.”

That means the recession, on paper, will be over by Christmas if Congress DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL.

I have come to realize that Barney Rubble knows this. After all, Congressman Frank himself acknowledges that he is the smartest man in Congress.

The reason to get the stimulus passed in a hurry is the same as the reason to push through the $700 billion TART overnight: if they held it up to the cold light of day, people would realize it was a scam.

Mr. Heinlein also wrote that the best government is the government that doesn’t try to govern.

Acting Director Robert A. Sunshine lost his job on January 22.

What a surprise.

Barack Obama said, “There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”

The Cato Institute, an inside-the-beltway think tank with strong libertarian leanings, disagreed. In fact, they found a few hundred economists to sign a full page newspaper ad the day after Mr. Sunshine testified.

Too bad no one reads newspapers any more.

CTO-I & II

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CTO-I

CTO stands for Chief Technology Officer.
CIO stands for Chief Information Officer.
CSC stands for Cyber Security Czar.

I own Motorola stock. The reason this disclosure is important will become obvious below.

Dear Mr. President:

Welcome to your new stature as the nation’s Number One Temporary Employee.

Business Week reports that you have two executives in mind for your newly minted position of federal Chief Technology Officer, one from Cisco Systems and one from the Washington, D.C., government.

Padmasree Warrior was CTO at Motorola before joining Crisco. She directed research for the Motorola “semiconductor unit and ran its energy systems group before being appointed CTO in 2003—when she was placed in charge of a 4,600-person R&D lab.”

She has impressive qualifications on paper. The facts on the ground look a bit different. During her tenure at MOT, the number of innovative products dwindled, the stock price tumbled, and the company slashed employment including reportedly more than half the R&D staff. Motorola employees are … wary … of Ms. Warrior. And I have lost thousands of dollars on Motorola stock. On paper.

Ms. Warrior “could sing and dance ably, but her words and ideas were empty,” one Motorolan told me.

Mr. Kundra looks just as good on paper. He has served as a technology officer for Virginia and, in D.C., runs “his 600-person staff like a startup, experimenting in … cutting-edge technologies.” He already advises you on technology issues.

Common sense suggests we need people in government who innovate and build. Due diligence means we need people who look even better on the ground than they do on paper.

Be very wary; the bright and shiny object you want may be a mylar balloon filled with hot air. Please choose wisely.

CTO-II
President Barack Obama is the first geek to become president; we real life geeks and nerds certainly applaud his personal knowledge of the Internet and his hands-on skill with the Barackberry (even I don’t have a smartphone). The only other politicians who come close may be Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and former DNC Chair Howard Dean.Mr. Obama will focus heavily on technology early in his new administration. That’s a good thing. He intends to create a Chief Technology Officer (and the accompanying Chief Technology Office) to complement the federal Chief Information Officer (and her accompanying Chief Information Office) and the equally new federal Cyber-Security Czar (and the accompanying Cyber-Security Office). That may not be a good thing.

“The President-elect clearly recognizes the importance of technology,” Technology Association of America’s Jeff Lande told BusinessWeek, “and is elevating them to the appropriate level of importance in his Administration.”

Swell.

Why does the Federal government need so many high level people to build empires that do pretty much the same job?

I may be a bear of very little brain but I have some trouble finding enough honey in the tree to keep all these offices out of each others’ hair.

If it were my job, I’d form a committee to create an office to consider the problem of studying the offices. No. Scratch that. If it were my job, I would spend 30 or 40 seconds of Deep Thought (>==note big blue pun) and realize that I can handle only so many direct reports. I would decide that the Cyber Czaring is a Homeland Security issue. I would determine that the Information Office and Technology Office are complementary bodies that need a single head.

OK, I’m done. I may not have solved all of the problems of the Federal Gummint but I have whittled them down a little.

Conservation of Resources

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It is more important to honor Martin Luther King Jr. than to honor blacks.

It is also more important to honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln than to honor “Presidents.”

And it is more important to honor Mollie Beattie than to honor women.

What? You’ve never heard of Mollie Beattie?

Black History Month is celebrated each February in the United States and Canada and in October in the UK. This month-long homage highlights contributions of black people and events.

Presidents Day (note the lack of an apostrophe) is a federal holiday here in the United States. We celebrate not on February 12 or February 22 but rather on the third Monday of the month so we can have a three day weekend.

Women’s History Month in March is major commemoration of the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that American women can now own entire properties by bequest or outright purchase. The farmhouse we bought in Vermont came with an interesting history: the first Mrs. Stevens to live here outlived the first Mr. Stevens to live here (this was originally the Stevens farm). Mr. Stevens, apparently worried that his children would turn their mother out, bequeathed to her the use of a bedroom, “cooking facilities,” and the cellar for storage.

I’m glad that American politicians can now spend endless time on world-altering events like declaring holidays and then going on them.

And I’m glad that Americans, whether black or white or purple or green can now buy houses, build businesses, go to school, marry, and vote. When I lived in New Jersey, the election judge who signed me in was a black man named Harper. He looked at my ID, looked at his name badge, and looked at my ID again.

“Oh,” he said, “You’re from the other side of the family.”

I was pleased but someday, we won’t notice which side of the family we came from.

We certainly need Presidents. Without them, Congress would have run amok with all this holidaying far sooner and the now-233 year history of this particular democratic experiment would have been written in about 87 years.

Martin Luther King Jr. started out as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Alabama. As arguably the strongest voice for civil rights, he was first a man people might never heard of.

Mollie Beattie was a Vermonter and the first woman to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As arguably the strongest single voice for wildlife conservation, she was a woman most people still have never heard of.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are larger than life now but they were just George and Abe to their families and to the people nearest them.

They all gave us something more. George and Abe share two important traits with Martin and Mollie: they did more than they thought they would and they all inspired us to do more than we thought we could. That’s heroic.

We need heroes. When we honor mere Presidents, all we get is another sale.