Tag: US Army

💎 On personalisation being nothing new (YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU)

So they ran a recruitment poster.

But the visual didn’t show massed ranks of soldiers.

With the headline, ‘THE BRITISH ARMY IS SHORT OF TWO MILLION NEW RECRUITS’.

The visual was Kitchener pointing out of the poster, straight at the person looking at the poster.

And the headline said, ‘YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU’.

One-to-one.

And that poster worked.

It got millions of recruits.

By talking to people one at a time.

It was so successful the USA copied it a few years later with a picture of Uncle Sam and the same headline.

And it recruited millions of men there, too.

Excerpt from: Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in Out-Thinking the Competition by Dave Trott

💎 On the power of aligning incentives (jumping out of a plane)

Here’s another example: in World War 2, US paratroopers had a problem with the fact that, allegedly, one in twenty chutes failed in some way. The soliton was to require the packers and inspectors to regularly jump out of airplanes using parachutes chosen at random from the store. The quality of packing then rose to 100 per cent and stayed there. “The packers are all jumpers,” explained on NCO to Stars and Stripes magazine: ” We try to have each man jump once a month. That’s a pretty food way to keep them honest on the tables.”

Excerpt from: One Step Ahead: Notes from the Problem Solving Unit