investiledysfunction

I’d previously written and complimented Domino’s Pizza Tracker in a post entitled “Innovative Pizza Technology“.  While skeptical at first, I did find the Pizza Tracker to be a pretty useful little technology.

For the exact opposite in pizza technology, we have Papa John’s Order Online Widget which they’ve created for Facebook.  This technology marvel has 34 users so far.  As Caroline Waxler points out in her Nov 2008 Fast Company article entitled Social Misfits, the widget “lets customer place their order upto 21 days in advance of their preferred delivery date or pickup date and time.”  She goes onto to appropriately state this functionality is great if you just sit back and “Remember that time you got a pizza craving for two weeks from next Tuesday @ 7pm and couldn’t act on it?”

Building a Facebook, iPhone app or using Twitter doesn’t make you current or cool if you’re not doing anything to actually help you enhance your brand and ultimately sell more stuff.  These attempts are just as misguided as the me too social networks which were cropping up regularly but which the current market malaise seems to have squashed a bit.  Technology for technology’s sake, no matter how cool, is a bad investment.  These gizmos must help people actually do something they want to or might be interested in doing and ideally help them do it better.

Here’s the Papa John’s widget.  I’m going to get going now and order a pizza for Nov 23rd now.

My favorite business book ever is called The Halo Effect.  The description on Amazon reads “This tart takedown of fashionable management theories is a refreshing antidote to the glut of simplistic books about achieving high performance.  Consultants, journalists and other pundits tap scientifically suspect methods to produce what he calls ‘business delusions’: deeply flawed and widely held assumptions tainted by the ‘halo effect,’ or the need to attribute sweeping positive qualities to any company that has achieved success.”

In essence, business and the management of business is not a science so despite the well-crafted storytelling of the pundits, most business books are just good stories built on dubious assertions and data.  Click here to learn more about the book.

And so it was nice to read Elizabeth Spiers’ recent column in April 2008’s Fast Company entitled Library of the Living Dead: Embrace a Business Best Seller at Your Brain’s Peril.  (Note: Spiers is the founding editor of Gawker and Dealbreaker)  She writes “Contrary to what your parents and teachers told you, reading does not necessarily make you smarter…I’ll point you to the modern era’s second-worst literary promulgator of intelligence reduction: your local bookstore’s business section.”

She closes with a great paragraph which I’ve copied below so everyone can just take it in because it quite perfectly captures the problem that business books present.

“Business books let us amble zombielike through our careers, freeing us from responsibility for the quality of our own decision making. Better to delegate that responsibility to other people — Jack Welch, perhaps. It’s a fresh spin on the old saw that no one ever got fired for buying IBM: No one will ever get canned for leaning on something with a Ken Blanchard blurb on the front cover. The alternative, too frightening to contemplate, is to admit that problems are usually too complex to be reduced to one-size-fits-all solutions, to train ourselves to do our own analysis, and to be a little more skeptical when the shrieking man on TV tells us to buy shares of Google right this very minute. If we can’t do that, let’s at least reshelve business best sellers where they belong — in the self-help section.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.