The image of the bottle crushing down into a vase for a little sprig of green is branding genius, memorable and communicative. But why did Coca-Cola make a single product, rather than bottling ALL of its drinks in the lighter bottles? The whole endeavor is either a cynical greenwashing or a gutless baby step.

They’re Coke. What’s stopping them from taking making a bolder move?

p.s. I LOHAS’s tagline, “Delicious + Good for the environment” is a less illegal but no less ugly lie than if Phillip Morris still claimed low tar cigarettes are good for the body.

I have a few responses.

1. Sometimes you need to work hard, even when you are working smart.

Creative work rarely goes from good to great without some hard work. This doesn’t mean that every job needs to take 500 hours, but some just do. And the ones that only take 5 minutes often take only 5 minutes because you’ve worked hard at similar tasks years ago and now they come easy.

There are plenty of other legitimate reasons to work hard, even when you’re working smart: your partner is out sick, you made a mistake, someone else made a mistake, you’re on a roll, etc.

2. Who wants a 4-hour work week?

I have no interest in a 4-hour work week, I love my job. I work in a comfortable office with people I respect and care about, doing projects which are enjoyable.

If the idea of a 4-hour work week is attractive to you, you’ll probably have better luck at happiness by looking for a better job or looking to make your current job more enjoyable than by searching for a way to get rich quick, get other people to do your work for you, or whatever other snake oil this book is selling.

(It seems like the easiest way to achieve the 4-hour work week is to write a book about the 4-hour work week. Except that someone already did that.)

3. Working smart is not a bad idea.

Of course it’s not. But it does mean different things to different people and professions. For me?

• Regularly asking myself if I’m going in the right direction and knowing when to start over and when it’s time to push further
• Knowing when good enough is good enough and when it isn’t. (* story on inside of box)
• Knowing when shortcuts are going to end up taking me longer to fix than doing things the right way from the beginning
• Knowing when asking others for help will save time and when it will cost time
• Knowing when doing something today will take half the effort it will take tomorrow, and when it will take twice

I learned (and am learning) most of this stuff through experience gained while working hard, as most people probably do.

Hard work is not necessarily a virtue and certainly not for everyone, but some people (myself included) enjoy it. We may change our mind someday, but in the meantime, skip the lecture and let us get back to work!

—

* In my college summers, I used to work light construction with my father and uncle. One morning my uncle gave me a tiny closet to paint, and left me be.

He came back a few hours later to check up, shocked to find me still in the closet, sweatily struggling to get the paint strokes to all go in the same direction. He boasted about how he and my dad used to compete for who could get more apartments painted before lunchtime, and then he told me my closet was fine as is.

I protested and pointed to the uneven brush marks, when he smiled as his eyebrows arched upwards.

“I have just the thing to fix that.”

Then he reached up and pulled the little string hanging from the light bulb in the ceiling and the closet went dark.

Full disclosure, I’m a friend and ex-colleague of Luke Wroblewski, a designer at Yahoo whom the author uses as an example of a well-respected web professional, whose personal design consultancy “makes him look flighty and unprofessional” and “makes both his consultancy and Yahoo!’s design practice look a bit dodgy”.

On the contrary, I bet that the existence and maintenance of that very site is part of why Yahoo decided he was right for the job in the first place. The work and thinking contained within the site shows that Luke is aggressive, independent, well-rounded and engaged with the outside world, all qualities I look for and admire in AQ’s small staff. Likewise, as a prospective client of Luke’s, his position at Yahoo combined with his lukew.com presence would give me a pretty good idea of the type and caliber of design problems he’s capable of addressing.

More than ever, people in general create multiple online identities as a way to make themselves easy to find, give the world a more complete understanding of who they are, and attract and maintain interest in what they’re doing. While the writing style of lukew.com may be a bit more corporate than it needs to be, the site essentially acts as one these identities for Luke, and I, for one, am glad that he continues to maintain it. I imagine his employer is too.

I’m struggling to imagine the someone or some purpose behind a top-page only English version of Rakuten, “Japan’s biggest online shopping mall”. For anyone comfortable enough with Japanese to use the rest of the site, an English top page is unnecessary, and for anyone without the Japanese skills to use the rest of the site, an English top page does nothing to help them complete a purchase. They didn’t even bother to put the word Rakuten in English anywhere in the site’s masthead.

I’d love to hear the back story on this. Anyone have any details?

The green Infobar was sold out at Bic, so I moved on to Eiko’s W53CA, flagging down a rep. Before escorting me to his 3-card Monty table, he kindly warned me of the three or four “optional” programs I would be *forced* to sign up for, regardless of which phone I chose or where I bought it.

This was the first trade in I’d done since phone numbers were decoupled from carriers, and little did I know how absurdly complex the process had become since then. In this rant, I won’t even get into the different minute and packet plans, since they’ve been around long enough to be beaten on by more knowledgable critics than me.

Full Support Course vs. Simple Course
As far as I can tell, by buying the phone at the discounted price, I automatically signed up for Full Support. They are essentially supporting you by giving you a ¥21,000 (USD200) discount on the handset’s invisible retail price, but *locking you into the carrier and the phone for 2 years*, with penalty fees if you change either. Additionally, Full Support is the gateway for the standard diner menu of minute/packet plans, whearas the Simple Course, offers just a few cheaper plans with no prepaid minutes or packets.

Full Support is clearly nothing more than a tactic to scare beloved customers into sticking with au, now that they are no longer locked in. It seems to also be a replacement to the tiered handset pricing scheme that made new phones progressively cheaper the longer you held on to your previous one.

Call Designation Discount
This “discount” option costs ¥300 a month. It allows you a 60% discount on calls made to any three phone numbers. I guess this would allow certain people who call the same numbers all the time to select a cheaper plan with less pre-paid minutes, but even then it’s hard to know if the numbers would work in your favor since au doesn’t send detailed call records with your monthly bill.

I was forced to sign up for this option, but canceled it the next day. At worst, I’ll be charged the first month’s ¥300, but I’m sure there are plenty of customers who forget to cancel, and will now be short pocket change for a night of Karaoke once a year.

???? (Waiting song)
Ever call a friend on Docomo and hear some lame melody trying to make love to the dial tone? That’s Machi-uta, and it’s come to au at ¥300 per month.

I was forced to sign up for this twisted spawn of a focus group gone wrong wrong wrong. I canceled the next day.

Safe mobile support
This is essentially Apple Care for au, at, you guessed it, ¥300 per month. Five year repair warranty, discounted repairs on stuff not covered by warranty, discounted replacement costs, two free batteries over four years, and extra points. It’s actually not a bad deal for anyone who use a single handset for 3+ years, but for the rest of us, it’s just another sleazy fee.

I was forced to sign up for this too. I canceled the next day.

Everybody Discount
No it’s not the next Japanese dance craze. A few years ago, there was a “Wari” (discount) war between carriers, starting with a couples discount, followed by a family discount, then a students discount, second handset discount, a discount for the elderly, the left handed, and finally, gas station attendants with leap year birthdays. Au then decided that it’d be easier if they just gave a discount to *everybody*, but generously decided to keep all the other discounts, probably to take the sting off the second mortgage you take out to pay off all those ¥300 yen fees.

Believe it or not, Everybody Discount doesn’t cost anything, but is only available if you lock yourself in for two years. Wait, didn’t they cover that with Full Support?

In Conclusion
For all the convenience the mobile phone industry provides me, it has few competitors for my disgust. I’d like to believe that their convoluted games were forced by some genuinely unavoidable industry-specific economic factors that I’m unaware of, but deep down I suspect that they’d rather nickel and dime profits out of their customers with useless add-ons and devious pricing schemes than earn it through good ideas.

Postscript on the green infobar
Undeterred, I hit Ito Yokado yesterday, where I’d seen the model in stock the previous week. It was still available, but alas, only available to new customers. Apparently, after 6 years and $6000 of loyalty to au, I’m only worthy of grey or red & white check.

Update: This post used to include the Japanese terms for these crazy plans, but Wordpress chewed them up when I upgraded to v 2.7. Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) I don’t remember what they were called

I’m not certain there’s a significant difference in quality, but it’s a clever way to calm food source paranoias in a country where American beef with spinal tissue and frozen Chinese dumplings laced with rat poison lead the nightly news.

• AQ is working with Firefox on a short video contest.
• We’re going home for Christmas, first time in five years.
• I fell into a black hole of Kitchen Nightmares watching last month. Theatrics and cursing aside, I really appreeciate Gordon Ramsay’s sober approach to business. The message I take away from most of the episodes is, if you put sentiment and pride aside to see and accept the immutable realities of your business, the resulting discoveries and changes will make running that business more enjoyable and rewarding in the long run.
• This restaurant is doing everything right.
• So is this one.
• TAB is running a Haiku contest.
• Hitotoki is launching in London.