Marketing as we know it happened because of machines. Machines made factories dramatically more efficient, which meant that producers could no longer easily sell everything they made. When you go from making four ceramic plates a day to 4,000, your capacity starts to look like a problem.

That’s a new challenge. A farmer could figure out how to use every bit of fertile soil available.

CBS TV didn’t have excess capacity. There are only 24 hours in a day, and they could only broadcast one at a time. YouTube, on the other hand, makes almost all of its decisions based on their unlimited capacity to host video.

The challenge of infinity is contagious. While some freelancers are fully booked, most have hours each day unspoken for. An unspoken hour of capacity can feel like a burden.

The quest for more is seductive.

But what happens when we accept that capacity might not be excess? It might simply be capacity.

How do we start to see our way toward better, not simply more?

When the truck makes a delivery at the nearby True Value hardware store, Danny needs to figure out which shelf to put it on.

Should the extension cords go next to the hoses? After all, they both do the same thing, one with electricity and one with water…

The purpose of putting things in order is so that others can find them.

If you’ve been frustrated with a price list, a menu, a user interface or a bookshelf, it’s because someone didn’t spend the time to understand the expected taxonomy.

When we sort our stuff, we’re telling people a story. A story about our stuff and a story about how we see the world.

We don’t have to like the fact that the world demands a taxonomy, but we can accept that it does. Strangers want to know what shelf to put us on.

You might be both.

In big organizations, project management is a distinct skill. It involves timekeeping, record keeping and organization. The project manager knows the budget and the deadline, and ensures that constituents stay in sync. This is the construction coordinator and the movie producer.

The product manager, on the other hand, makes decisions about features, scale and the final product. The product manager coordinates many inputs and ultimately makes critical marketing decisions, because they’re deciding what the product is. This is the architect, the movie director and the real estate developer.

In startups, agencies and scrappy organizations, it’s quite likely that one person is doing both jobs.

If that’s you, it’s worth a second to consider if it pays to get better at the one you don’t like as much. Managing projects better changed my career.

Organizations lie all the time. Big lies, sometimes, but usually small ones.

Is the call volume actually unusually heavy? Did a chef really prepare this meal just for me?

These fiblets are so common that they become part of the culture, a trope that lets the user know that this is a real organization–the same way that certain kinds of logos are trendy, these lies show that the organization is part of a particular genre. (Have you ever noticed how many INSURANCE COMPANIES WRITE SOME OF THEIR RULES IN ALL CAPS? It’s because that’s what big insurance companies do).

The insurgent marketer, then, has two practical choices:

1. You can easily show that you’re not of this group by relentlessly telling the truth to your customers. “We know that this phone tree is inconvenient, but it saves our operators time and so it saves us money.” Or, “The boss doesn’t want you to walk around the service bay, it has nothing to do with insurance regulations.”
2. You can sniff out the fiblets your competitors use and use them as well, creating the meta fib that you’re as big and heartless a bureaucracy as they are.

As consumers, it definitely doesn’t pay to call out the fiblets when talking to hard-working frontline employees. They’ve got it tough enough already.

“You can try this at home…”

But you probably won’t.

The secret recipe isn’t the reason Coke is successful. And the recipe for KFC isn’t much of a recipe at all.

The secret way you do the thing isn’t what keeps your clients coming back. It’s the part you do in public that matters.