The Paradox of Choice explores a paralyzing but simple problem. Is too much choice a bad thing?

Published in 2004 and written by American psychologist Barry Schwartz, the overwhelming verdict is yes, too much choice is a bad thing. As counterintuitive as that idea may be, Schwartz has put his finger on why so many things seem wrong with our world despite the unabashed comfort in which we live.

Schwartz wrote the book to explain why he felt terrible after buying a new pair of jeans. As Schwartz puts it, buying jeans used to take five minutes, “Now it was a complex decision in which I was forced to invest time, energy and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety and dread.”

Schwartz is not the most talented writer and there is a lot of jargon and studies to wade through, but he’s figured something out here. What he’s saying just makes sense. Maybe watching MTV’s Cribs isn’t the best idea.

While buying jeans may be trivial as the number of choices goes up for important things like jobs, romantic partners and investing, negative aspects begin to appear. “Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize,” says Schwartz.

In the book, Schwartz brings up a study done on voluntary retirement plans. For every 10 mutual funds an employer offered, the rate of participation went down two per cent. So, if you were an employer and you offered 50 mutual funds to your employees, 10 per cent would not participate. If you offered only five mutual funds, only one per cent would not participate. In many of these cases the employer would match the employees contribution at up to $5000 a year but, regardless, the more choice that was offered, the less people signed up.

Here’s another example from the book: A display was set up at a gourmet food store featuring a line of exotic, high-quality jams. Customers could come by and taste the samples and were given a coupon for a dollar off the jam. They ran this test with two different conditions: one with six jams, the other with 24 jams. The results were again, incredible.

“Thirty per cent of the people exposed to the smaller amount of jams actually bought a jar; only three per cent of those exposed to the large array of jams did so.”

This is not to say that if we had no choice we would be happy. Schwartz argues that you run into problems at both ends of the choice spectrum.

His insights into regret (both actual and potential), expectations, missed opportunities, maximizing vs. satisficing and adaptation are spot on.

So how do we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of choice? The prescriptions offered from Schwartz are quite simple. Be grateful, control your expectations, make your decisions non-reversible, regret less, curtail your social comparisons and learn to love constraints. None of what he offers is groundbreaking stuff, but if applied, you might find yourself a little happier at the end of the day, both professionally and personally.

So what are you spending your time on? How long do you need to compare labels at a grocery store? When have you visited enough clothing stores? From your personal to your professional life, this book has some valuable insight. I recommend it.

View his TED talk below. It’s a solid introduction to the concepts in his book.

Every year around this time, I do some brainstorming about what I want to accomplish throughout the year. It’s a goal setting exercise whereby I think about what’s important to me, the achievements I want to make and how they fit into my long term goals. Then, I spend some time figuring out how I’m going to balance my goals with other important things in my life like my education, travel, relationships, etc.

At this time last year, for example, I developed a plan to write a new personal finance book for young couples aged 25 to 40. My mission was to give readers the tools to grow their net worth. I’ve accomplished my goal, and in March 2010, I plan to release my second book, Rich by Forty: A Young Couple’s Guide to Building Net Worth. In order to accomplish this goal, I had to find balance. Yes, there were many late nights where I hovered over my computer, BUT, I made sure that I did some travel, built up my personal finances, strengthened my relationships, spent time developing my career, balanced my budget every month and much more. Had I not struck a balance between these competing priorities, I’m sure I would have experienced a very unfulfilling year.

What follows are strategies on how to manage conflicting priorities for your time, money and energy and figure out what’s important to you.

Listen to the Podcast

In this episode of Deskercise, a look at how your usual office chair, stability ball and hybrid stability ball/chair stack up.

“It’s all about the people, so why not give them the best views? The principals are entitled to offices but when we moved into the space, they decided to sit out in the studio close to the windows and be a part of the team,” says Dean Matsumoto, a principal with Kasian who directed the interior design of the office.

Their democratic approach to office space helps promote equality and team building while making it easy for people to move around after projects are completed.

Built in a soft loft style with around 20,000 square feet, the architecture, interior design and planning firms’ Toronto office is a light-filled collaborative space. The walls are free from fancy prints and motivational sayings. Instead every wall in the office is magnetic, whiteboard or tackable and covered in the work of the moment.

“We’re always pinning up work to look at it, study it. The walls serve a purpose.”

A favourite feature of Matsumoto’s is the “Touchdown” area. It links the boardroom to the reception area with a long glass table. A multi-use area, one day it could be home to a standup project presentation, another it might double as “the best bar in Toronto.”

The first thing you see when entering the office is the view of downtown Toronto.

It’s located west of downtown, near the trendy and newly converted to mixed use Liberty Village. Surrounded by artists and fellow creatives, Matsumoto is very happy with the location.

“There is lots of live-work space around us. It’s a very vibrant neighbourhood. It’s helped us to attract people.”

The open kitchen is incorporated into what Matsumoto calls the “marketplace.” You’ll find the copy machine, fax, printers and office supplies as well as the research library all in the same place. If you have to go up and get some “stuff,” this is where you’ll be going.

Matsumoto, who designed the space, loves how it came together.

“The fact that it’s so bright is energizing right off the bat. One thing about our office is that there is nowhere to hide because it’s so open. The people that you’re working with are immediately accessible.”

Dan Clark is a networker, but he isn’t a note writer.

The 26-year-old says networking plays an important role in his job as a commercial analyst at a Calgary utilities company. But his style of networking seldom, if ever, involves anything written by hand.

“I can’t say I’ve ever used a handwritten note,” Clark says. “Honestly, I think I would just feel a little uncomfortable providing a client or a co-worker, especially a male co-worker, a handwritten note.”

Though Clark frequently shows gratitude by taking a colleague out for lunch, for a coffee or for a beer after work, handwritten notes just aren’t part of the business environment he works in, and Clark isn’t alone. In a digital world, the demise of the handwritten thank you note is widespread, especially among men, according to author and networking expert Thom Singer.

Singer says non-note writers are missing out on an opportunity to set themselves apart from the business crowd.

“In business, when you first meet somebody, or you want to thank a potential client for their time, or you want to thank somebody that has sent you a referral or a piece of business, you also want to know that you stand out,” Singer says. “I get 250 emails a day. I don’t get very many handwritten notes. When you do get a handwritten note, you know that the person took the extra time to acknowledge you.”

Every Friday afternoon, Singer sits at his desk, looks over his appointments and engagements from the previous week, and writes out 10 thank-you notes. By the end of the year, he has sent 520 handwritten notes. The odds he’ll get a thank you back aren’t all that good.

“I put a box under my desk to see how many I get, and last year I got about 38,” Singer says.

Singer says men are more likely than women to make excuses for not writing thank yous. Poor handwriting, reliance on email and a lack of time are frequently cited, he says.

While Clark and many others like him avoid the handwritten note, Clark’s girlfriend Megan Marshall, 26, is in the pro thank-you note camp. As a community investment professional, she finds handwritten notes are a good way to build relationships, a very important part of her job.

“Often, the business world can be very impersonal, so using handwritten notes gives the opportunity to connect in a more personal way,” Marshall says. “They’re often not expected.”

Marshall says she’s aware of the thank-you note gender divide. She thinks some of her male colleagues might feel uncomfortable sending thank-you notes. And she knows it’s not part of her boyfriend’s networking style.

“He’s pretty good at networking, but he does it in his own way,” Marshall says. “I haven’t tried to convince him. I don’t think he’s missing out on a huge opportunity, but it might add value if he used it to accompany what he already does.”

Clark’s lack of note writing doesn’t seem to be holding him back, though. About a year ago, he was looking for a career change, so he ramped up his networking efforts. A networking lunch with a manager at another company turned into a tip about a job posting. Clark applied. The manager followed with a phone call. Clark got an interview. Then he got the job. How did he follow up?

“I followed up with a thank-you email,” Clark says, laughing. “But once I landed the job here, I did take the guy out for lunch.”

For good and bad, the Internet has become a major player in our lives. It has shaped our relationships and changed how we interact with our community. For those of us who have chosen a career path as a freelancer, a designer, a photographer or an artist, the Internet has become a way to forge a career by our own rules. It has allowed us to showcase our knowledge through blogs and promote our artistic merit through online portfolios. All in an attempt to find paying clientele and create an independent lifestyle free from the corporate shackles that imprisoned our previous generation.

And while it all may sound like roses, something ugly is rearing its head around the online “water coolers” of the freelance community. An intense backlash has formed against the hands that allow us this freedom – a backlash against our own clients.

In the past year, dozens of humour sites have cropped up, exposing the frustration between a freelancer’s work and their client’s expectations. The web site Clients From Hell and the twitter account BITCHCO are two popular examples. Well-established web comics like BusinessGuysOnBusinessTrips and Freelance Freedom have thrived on the negativity brewing from a group of workers who feel underappreciated by older clients and upper management.

But in recent months, the backlash towards clients has become poignant and more aggressive. The freelance community is making it known how much it dislikes low levels of appreciation from ill-informed clients.

In May of 2009, user experience designer Dustin Curtis took aim at the poor design experience at American Airlines’ corporate website. Through a series of blog posts and comment discussions, a member of American Airlines’ design team was eventually fired. Then in July of the same year, 51 of the web’s most influential search engine optimization (SEO) experts were carbon copied (rather than blind carbon copied) on an ill-advised Request for Proposal, which spiralled into a personal attack on the original sender by the SEO community. Ultimately this entire email chain was posted for the rest of the freelance community to read. Finally, in the closing days of 2009, designer David R. Thorne essentially gave an unrealistic client the proverbial middle finger through a series of quick-witted emails and detailed pie charts.

While there was an undeniable amount of humour in Thorne’s response, his usage of 3-D pie charts and clip art is commendable; it does shed light on the volatile nature of the client-freelancer relationship and the appeal of these sites. As Julie Vincent, a photographer and independent mortgage broker noted, “Freelancers look for stories that are similar to ours as confirmation that we’re not alone in having the occasional frustrating client. Those sites are also great sources of how not to be a client.”

What is fuelling the divide? While the Internet has allowed creatives to find their own way, the freedom it provides has made this backlash inevitable.

The tools that many freelancers use are now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. Anyone can start a website at blogger.com or venture into the world of professional photography with Adobe Photoshop. After all, if one can start a blog in five minutes, building an e-commerce website must be equally easy.

The availability of these tools has, in turn, reduced the degree of separation between these industries and your everyday citizen. Whether it is your neighbour’s son or your best friend’s roommate, everyone is connected to someone who dabbles in the industry in some form.

Lastly, the perceived level of “magic” associated with most freelance industries has diminished. A quick Google search on search engine optimization may suggest the discipline is rather basic and rudimentary but the actual process is complex and overwhelming.

The availability of information provided by the Internet has diluted the value of a freelancer’s work and also removed the shroud of mystery for many industries.

When it is all said and done, the client relationship is always going to be a cornerstone of the freelance career path. Outlandish requests and misguided clients will be a continuous aspect of the lifestyle, but the above-mentioned sites go a long way in reminding freelancers that we are not alone and it is ok to laugh. But what is the next step in this relationship? What action by some scorned designer or writer will triumph Thorne’s genius pie charts? As more posts and sites of this nature appear, at what point will email chains like the ill-advised SEO proposal become commonplace around our online water coolers? And how many more comic strips can be filled with client horror stories?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but my gut tells me that we’ll be seeing a few more examples of this backlash before it gets quieter.

After cutting his teeth in the oil & gas Industry, Connor Turner is the owner/operator of web-design/social media outfit Armadillo Studios Inc. He’s active in the Calgary design and web community, helping to launch the yycPhotobook and blogging about local companies at c.t.overdrive.ca. He’s warming up to Helvetica, but they’re still not BFF’s.

When Jay Conrad Levinson first wrote Guerilla Marketing, he was looking to help small businesses be smarter with their marketing spending. Affordability was key, and although guerilla can be synonymous with sexy and subversive, he talked a lot about profit margins and direct mail. Somewhere from there to here, creative advertisers stole his term. The “guerilla” isn’t about whether it’s on the street or on a billboard, the guerilla is about the intent of the advertiser, and whether the audience reads that intent as credible or false.

Although Levinson coined the term in the ‘70s, guerilla marketing finds its true roots in the stunts of publicity hogs like Thomas Edison. Seriously, watch the “electrocuting an elephant” video on YouTube. This was staged by Edison to show the danger of Nikola Tesla’s AC technology, a competitor to Edison’s DC technology. Warning: I found it kind of disturbing, as I expect you will.

More than a hundred years after Edison electrocuted Topsy, a bomb squad in Boston detonated a Lite-Brite as the result of another interesting marketing stunt. To promote a movie based on a late night cartoon, the people behind the movie hired a couple of performance artists to place Lite-Brites featuring characters from the show around the city (as well as in other major U.S. cities). Accompanying the displays were countdown timers – never a good idea in post-9/11 U.S.A. A public-transit employee called in the cavalry and a $5 Lite-Brite shut down Boston for a couple of hours.

The Boston performance artists were released on bail, charged with “placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic” (seriously) and “disorderly conduct,” and just to hammer home the fact that this was in fact guerilla, a network VP was let go. Although this campaign was relatively inexpensive for a major network, it was unique in every way and a crazy PR machine. Many people would question whether it was a success. I’d say yes – for a couple of reasons.

This was a risky, national campaign. And although it got some bad press in Boston, it got a lot of attention through the magic of buzz. And despite everything, the campaign was perfect for the late night, risqué cartoon it was promoting. In this case, the medium really represented the ethos of the product. A lot of people disagree with me on this – but I won’t judge them for being wrong.

Edmonton boy and media visionary Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “The medium is the message” is relevant here: guerilla marketing challenges norms, and possibly legal conventions. Making an ad is easy – taking risks in order to entertain your audience is not. Guerilla marketing’s ability to surprise, and when done well, entertain, shows that an advertiser is putting some effort into connecting with its audience, rather than blowing more money on another ugly magazine ad. As long as it doesn’t feel like bullshit to the audience, it can be marketing gold.

Speaking of bullshit – Sony’s 2005 graffiti campaign to promote its PSP was so clearly commercial that people saw right through it. There was no natural link between the image they had of Sony as a massive money machine and the idea of graffiti as a subversive street-level art form. Turns out stealing cachet is much different than creating it.

In the same way that Sony borrowed graffiti’s cachet, Mr. Levinson “borrowed” the cachet associated with guerilla warfare. And it worked. It helped him move 20 million copies that wouldn’t have sold if he called it something more appropriate, like “frugal and profit-focused marketing for small businesses.” He made a smart move, but I think that the real guerilla marketers have since laid claim to the term, and rightly so. The new guerilla marketer is cost-sensitive, likes to break as many rules as it can get away with, and relies on creativity and buzz. It’s choosing to entertain their audience, rather than simply sell to them. Just, no more electrocuting elephants, OK?

Next time – A multimedia exploration of some of the best and worst examples of guerilla marketing.

Illustration by Jeff Kulak

The green economy is generating jobs all over the world. Ontario recently signed a $7-billion deal with Samsung for clean energy manufacturing jobs. A new report shows that California job creation is surging in only one area, the green collar economy. The application of entrepreneurial vigour to the environmental problems facing us presents the single largest area of economic opportunity available. Read how three eco-entrepreneurs made sure that they made it into the market early.

Our interviewees range across the green spectrum from a CEO to a tradesman to an entrepreneur whose company was acquired by a large German solar company. This is not cutting edge technology we’re talking about, these are ordinary folks seeing an opportunity and grasping it.

Super Solar

Kyle Kasawski is a managing director with Conergy, a large German-based solar photovoltaic manufacturer, designer and distributor. Business is booming for them in Canada, specifically in Ontario, where the Green Energy Act has spurred billions of dollars in renewable energy development. Kasawski started his own solar company, ETI Solar, in 2003 out of his garage, which was eventually acquired by Conergy in 2007.

Why did you choose to join the green economy?

Once I made that leap into this field, I knew I could work in it until I wanted to retire because there is no shortage of demand for energy. I also looked at it from the perspective that there are limited carbon-based resources that are precious and need to be preserved and I viewed renewables as this benign, beautiful thing that I was fascinated by.

Why start your own company?

In this field there was no way to get a job. You couldn’t just go out and get hired. There were limited options. Starting my own business was always an option and business was always something I was fascinated by. It was just a good fit. The entrepreneur route is something I always had on my mind.

What kind of potential do you see for eco-entrepreneurs?

It’s enormous. You either have to be patient and give yourself a three-year plan or be ready to move. The industry is just growing, even in Alberta, which is one of the slowest places to adopt but it will still happen here. Otherwise you go to somewhere where the market already is. People are switching over to green collar jobs all the time. One thing I coined was “working in the green patch.” The opportunities to do this are out there, but you have to be ready to struggle.

What is the biggest potential growth area for the green economy?

Energy. In Europe the technology is proven. You can reduce consumption and maintain a healthy lifestyle with improvements in efficiency and design. The rest you can fill in with renewable energy and a mixture of coal, natural gas, nuclear or hydro. I don’t see that slowing down.

What were you doing five years ago and where do you see yourself in five years?

Five years ago I was selling solar panels, mostly for off-grid battery-based applications. For the next five years I see myself doing project development, product development and procurement consulting. Helping people make good decisions about their projects, because with the sizable projects that are coming online, they need our expertise in solar applications.

Without the presenting and networking skills that Bautista has acquired, it’s doubtful he’d be where he is today. A recent Harvard Business Review study lays this all pretty bare. Without charisma, you can’t get funding and like anything it takes work and practice to get there.

Bautista has pitched publicly three times, at KidScreen, Venture Forum in Vancouver and Venture Prize and has won at all three. Discovery signed on to his project without a demo, getting on board based on the strength of the presentation alone.

He’s been to six or seven industry events a year for the past three years. To some people, that’s a slog but Bautista loves it. He gets a kick out of talking with his cohorts about what they’re working on and is very much a people junkie. Face-to-face networking is important but you can’t be everywhere at once. This is where online social networking comes into play. Bautista prefers Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

“From a business perspective, LinkedIn has been good. I get introduced to people and I introduce people,” says Bautista.

“Facebook is more ‘friends’ but it’s become more of that personal network. Makes it easy to keep in touch with people.”

He sees a link between being a good networker and a good presenter. When presenting, you’ll have a script. Talking points that include things you should return to when you get off track. But when you’re networking, you don’t use a script, that would just be weird and awkward. It’s in these networking situations that you can work on your off the cuff, unplanned talk about what you do. So, as Bautista puts it “You have to have this arsenal of stuff to talk about without sounding like a robot.”

The better you get at dealing with people in unscripted, unplanned discussion, the more natural your formal presentations will be.

Of course it’s rare that people find themselves with a microphone and a slide deck in front of hundreds of people. You have to get your practice in and Bautista got his from pitching his product from a very early stage. By starting early, he got feedback and gained a comfort level with the process. Every pitch he did helped him refine his message.

Bautista always goes into a presentation with a plan. “What are the one or two things they need to remember and then I craft my pitch around that.”

He wanted to get people to understand the mystery and the intrigue of his property as well as the multi-platform interactivity. During his KidScreen pitch, Bautista mocked up a crash screen and played it off like his computer had crashed during the presentation. People in the crowd were surprised, muttering to themselves. Then he got a phone call over the loudspeaker from one of the “agents” in the product he was pitching, telling him that there had been a security breach. He kept going through the pitch and came to slide that needed a password. He had planted a clue for the password under the judges’ chairs, and they were prompted to look there by another phone call over the loudspeaker.

“At this point the crowd is loving it.”

In this optimistic ode to a sustainable planet, Calgary-based writer Chris Turner tours the world, offering up slices of sustainability from Indian office parks, rural Thailand and other locales.

Turner, a former door knocker for Greenpeace, mixes a cheery outlook with a pop culture commentator vibe that makes the book quite readable. This is an excellent  introduction to basic sustainability concepts in energy, food, shelter and transportation but it also has a beating heart. His sincerity is engaging without being preachy. I particularly enjoyed his examination of carpet company Interface and his sojourns to Denmark.

I have a bit of a history with Turner. My parents gave me his first book, Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation, as a gift five years ago and I remember it as decent. What I liked about the book weren’t the dissections of various characters or discussions about the best Simpsons episodes of all time. It was that it widened my view of the pop culture world. He introduced me to things like street art, Banksy and Adbusters. In Hope, he does much the same, opening my eyes to the cool world of sustainability.

Turner can write but he’s also a helpful curator. After reading Hope, I went out and added books like Natural Capitalism and Small Is Beautiful to my reading list. My Internet browser bookmarks were similarly burnished with new places to visit like Grist (link).

Of course it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There are times when he goes too far with the background information. If you’re familiar with architecture, the introductory preambles on Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller and LEED might be a bit much. Also, his relentlessly optimistic approach glosses over some of the hard realities he’s talking about. Just because BP is investing in solar energy means little without context. He tends to curse, which I don’t really mind in real life but it hurts the message and seems out of place.

If you’re a nascent greenie or just want to introduce yourself to what a sustainable world would look like, I recommend The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner.

Read an excerpt from the Geography of Hope from issue 5 of Unlimited.