“I once asked Steve Jobs, often mistakenly considered a lone visionary and authoritarian leader, which of his creations made him most proud. I thought he might say the original Macintosh, or the iPhone. Instead he pointed out that these were all collaborative efforts. The creation he was most proud of, he said, were the teams he had produced…” –Walter Isaacson, preface to Team of Teams
Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors (2nd Edition)
In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt gave his famous “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne. Many of us likely read it in high school, perhaps even had to memorize parts of it. I know I did, but shortly thereafter filed it away in a dusty recess of my mind, presumed to be forgotten. Fortunately, Jeff Sutherland resurfaced it in Scrum:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. (source)
Jeff Sutherland writes in Scrum:
The thing that cripples communication saturation is specialization — the number of roles and titles in a group. If people have a special title, they tend to do only things that seem a match for that title. And to protect the power of that role, they tend to hold on to specific knowledge.
So we got rid of all titles. I called everyone and told them to rip up their business cards. If someone wanted to put a title on their resume, they could do it for external use only. In here, where the work was done, there were only team members. (emphasis added)
The marketing copy for the Oral-B Black is so bad, it needs to be scrubbed clean by a device more powerful than the toothbrush in question.
I’m not sure what agency is responsible for this, but marketing copy like this represents everything that is wrong with the world. It’s why marketers get a bad name, and it’s what happens when you don’t know how to write about benefits.
Take a gander at how they promote the “Six Brushing Modes” of the new Oral-B Black:
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