To celebrate Israel’s 60th Birthday, The American Jewish Committee has put out what may be the worst web advertising campaign ever.  Just now I clicked on a flash-ad on Slate.com that described different American cities and their characteristics.   Thinking it was an ad for a ranking of American cities (I love to critique their methodologies), I clicked through, only to come across this page from the AJC pointing out how Israel is Diverse, Innovative, Friendly, and Free.  In fact, that’s all it does.  The entire content of the website is a picture of a black couple at a strip-mall with the text:

Diverse. Innovative. Friendly. Free. These are just a few of the countless ways to describe Israel @ 60. A modern democracy with an enduring history, Israel’s unique mix of culture and ingenuity makes it a lot like home and yet like nowhere else on Earth.

I clicked through the ad to get what could very easily be a print ad hastily stuck at a URL.  There’s no content for me to explore, no call to action, no history of Israel, tourism info, testimonials or interviews with Israelis, anything.  Just a paragraph of text and a stock-photo.  I haven’t researched around yet to figure out the impetus behind this campaign, but to consider it a terrible waste of donor funds would be an understatement. If you’re going to advertise on the web, at least advertise something.

To break it down for the AJC, Indecipherable/Misleading Ad + Contentless Page = Worst Web Campaign Ever.

Categories: Israel, Marketing
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David Maister has posted a commencement address delivered by Stephen C. Ellis, the managing partner of a successful mid-sized law firm.  While he’s focused on the law (the address was at Case Western’s law school), it’s great advice for any professional, and I’m circulating it within my own firm and clients.  He has some great nuggets in there, including this interesting assessment of why the law can be such a miserable profession today:

The fact is our profession has become increasingly unhappy over the past couple of decades. I am convinced the vast majority of that unhappiness derives from a singleseemingly innocuous event in the late 1980’s: The American Lawyer magazine began publishing the AM LAW 100, and listed the profits per partner of the 100 largest firms. Virtually all of the firms in this country immediately bought in to that statistic as the only credible measure of success. The game was on - we lawyers would now take our measure almost entirely from money, at least in terms of what was publicly discussed. Without question, integrity, service and professionalism were important, but how we measured ourselves was money.

There’s also this great advice for aspiring lawyers:

If you’ve decided to become a lawyer solely to make money if to you it’s simply a job I fear you’ll hate it. As a career and a calling it’s great, and unbelievably interesting, but as simply a job, it’s way too hard and stressful. It’s the people, the pace and the endless puzzles of the law that make being a lawyer fulfilling. If you want tons of money for working twenty hours a day and nausea-inducing stress, Wall Street investment banking may be just the thing . In that business the grand old men are burnt out at 45.

I’ll frequently refer to investment banking as selling your youth - they pay you a fortune, but you spend the time in you have in your 20s and 30s working, and for many, large law firms have taken on the same climate.  But the people who don’t love it and just want the money won’t be able to work as hard or effectively as those who are passionate about their field, and subsequently, will never grasp the same rewards.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Law
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A coworker thinks that Kevin Jonas, of the apparently famous Jonas Brothers (which I hadn’t heard about until this morning) looks like me:

Thoughts?

Categories: Ephemera
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My roommates and I do a decent job of keeping our apartment clean, but there’s definitely room for improvement in our systems.  The problem is that cleaning our apartment is a public good, and like any public good, there’s tons of room for free-riding.  Anyone who has ever had roommates has most likely dealt with dirty dishes in the sink, or papers on the table, or piles of unread mail.  Unfortunately,  my brilliant idea, described below, is something only an economist could love, and I live with lawyers.

The solution to our problem, of course, is to attach a price to the various household chores we want done and compensate the person who accomplishes the task by having the other two roommates pay him.  I struggled with how to set the optimum level of payment for each task.  We could have each person decide how much they’d pay for the task, but what if nobody wanted to work at that level?  An alternative is to say how much each person wants to charge, but what if nobody pays it?

Co-op housing attempts to solve this problem through a system of fines and penalties, but if the fines are too low, then it will be seen as a charge for the service and not a penalty (thanks behavioral economics!).  You can force compliance by making the charges too high, but then there’s an opportunity for trade - between people who want to clean or need money and those who don’t - that’s being missed.

The optimal solution goes back to game theory - which teaches us how to incent both action and truth-telling.  There’s a classic problem in game theory where two business partners are trying to split a pie, or their company, or something.  Anyways, two people are trying to split something - and the best way to find an equitable split is to have the first player propose how much the pie/company is worth to them, and the second player decides whether to buy them out at that price, or sell to them at that price.  Because Player One doesn’t know which option Player Two will choose, they want to be as honest as possible about their true value of the pie/company/something, and will be indifferent between the two options.

The same goes for cleaning the apartment.  Give one roommate the option of saying what they value the chore at.  The other roommate has the option of either completing the chore at that price, or they can pay to have it done.  Running through the register of household cleaning tasks should create an equitable outcome, or give one roommate some supplemental income as a maid.  Either way, everyone wins - we all get to live in a clean apartment.

How’s this for a long post, Mom?

Categories: Behavioral Economics, Crazy Theories, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Strategy
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