Business Insight Zone

Wrapping up this little series of miscellaneous items, I offer you some uncategorized favorites.

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From the Presentation Zen blog: Ira Glass: Tips on Storytelling

I like, but don’t love, This American Life. But I have a ton of respect for Glass, who has taken a smart geek’s passion for storytelling and built a major following with it. Here’s my favorite bit from this piece:

“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”

That lesson needs to be hammered home not just to every storyteller, but to every corporate manager and line worker in the world. When you detect that something’s not worthwhile, just let it go.

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Here’s a crazy thought: listen to your customers when they tell you that you’re making them angry.

Give credit to Netflix. As John Murrell explains in this Good Morning Silicon Valley item, the company retracted the plan it had announced to eliminate its “Profiles” feature.

Profiles is the feature that allows you to have more than one Netflix queue at a time. So, if you have a three-DVDs-at-a-time account, you can allot one of of them to Dora the Explorer, Transformers cartoons, and other kiddie fare, while the grown-ups get to enjoy Syriana, Blazing Saddles, and season upon season of The Sopranos.

I would have assumed that the feature was broadly popular, since it could also ensure that one roommate / spouse / sibling could watch a string of romantic comedies while the other indulged a taste for horror flicks. This assumption was grounded, in no small part, upon my own household, where the kid / grown-up dichotomy is in full force.

As it happens, though, Profiles has been used only by a small minority of Netflix customers. Yet it’s a vocal minority — vocal enough to get the company to change its mind about removing the service. Like the Netflix customers Murrell quotes, my wife was relieved to find out that she could continue to keep Garfield and the like separate from Weeds.

We hear enough about bad customer service that it’s worth celebrating when a company does it right.

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David Armano: Whispers

This is a reflective, personal post well out of the norm for David, who typically blogs on branding, advertising, and similar topics.

Life’s whispers are often soft and subtle. They come without warning. The whispers are always there—but we’re not always listening. The noise we surround ourselves with often keeps the whispers at bay. We become incapable of hearing them, until we choose to. At this point we see through fresh eyes.

Part of my goal every time I write on this blog is to help you see the business world — whether that means a whole industry or your own e-mail inbox — with fresh eyes.

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From TIME.com: 10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas

It’s not all bad news: the high price of gasoline means less air pollution, slimmer waistlines, and less traffic (plus fewer traffic fatalities). I particularly liked this reminder of how these changes grow out of the American devotion to free markets:

“You suddenly are reminded how the economy works,” says Eric Roston, author of a new book about energy, The Carbon Age. “Nobody wants high prices for oil. But there’s also no faster mechanism to change behavior.”

Our love for the price mechanism may even outweigh our torrid, decades-long affair with the automobile. In any event, high-priced gas could bring many beneficial changes along with the pain now experienced by many commuters and businesses.

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(Photo by tsuacctnt.)

Category: Energy, Management, The business brain