Efficiency Gets You Nowhere Fast: Why Effectiveness Is Marketing’s Real Edge

"I lived on books. Books taught me how to think."--Seymour Hersh 

Marketing Matters, Business North
Published June 2026

When I first began working in a corporate environment one of the books I read was Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. It was so packed with gems that for several years I read it at least once a year. 

 

The first chapter is “Effectiveness Can Be Learned” and the opening sentence pierces like an arrow: “To be effective is the job of the executive.” But right away Drucker underscores this by letting his readers know that there’s a big difference between effectiveness and efficiency. “The executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done.” 

 

This distinction seems simple at first glance but it becomes more profound the longer you think about it. Efficiency, he said, is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. In marketing, it’s easy to confuse the two.

 

Many of us admire speed, productivity, automation, optimization, and multitasking. We celebrate go-getters who answer emails quickly, process orders rapidly, and fill every square on their calendars with activity. Entire industries have emerged to help us become more efficient. Software dashboards track our productivity. AI tools now promise to save hours. Consultants teach workflows, systems, and hacks.

 

None of this is inherently bad. Efficiency has value. But efficiency applied to the wrong objective simply gets you to the wrong destination faster. 

 

And that’s Drucker’s point. A company can become incredibly efficient at producing products no one wants. A sales team can efficiently pursue low-quality leads. A marketing department can perfectly execute campaigns directed to the wrong audience. A manager can spend an entire day clearing emails and attending meetings without advancing the organization’s mission a single inch. (I can tell you stories about meetings.)

 

In other words, efficiency asks: “How well are we doing this?” Effectiveness asks: “Should we even be doing this at all?” 

 

I'm guessing the marketplace is littered with businesses that were highly efficient right before they disappeared.

 

The railroad industry is a classic example. Many railroads believed they were in the railroad business when in reality they were in the transportation business. They became very good at operating railroads while airplanes, trucking, and automobiles redefined how people and goods moved across the country. They optimized the old model while the world changed around them. What works in Italy or Japan doesn't necessarily make sense here. Yet AMTRACK continues to burn (taxpayer) money while advocates push for new trains in California and here in Minnesota. Bite the bullet. Why this waste?

 

The same thing happens on a smaller scale every day. It’s probably not uncommon for business owners to obsess over reducing printing costs for their brochures without ever stopping to ask whether the brochure itself has any value. This is where marketing often goes sideways.

 

Many marketing conversations today revolve around metrics that look impressive but may not matter. I've written about this before. Clicks, impressions, views, followers, open rates, engagement percentages--these can all be useful indicators worth paying attention to, but they are not the ultimate question.

 

The ultimate question is simpler: Is this helping us achieve our real objective? If the goal is sales growth, are sales increasing? If the goal is customer loyalty, are customers returning? If the goal is brand awareness, are more qualified prospects entering the pipeline? If the goal is trust, are people recommending us to others? It's easy to become mesmerized by measurable activity while losing sight of meaningful outcomes.

 

This is why effectiveness requires clarity. You can't do the right things if you don't clearly define what “right” means.

 

I used to have a handwritten note taped on my wall where I could see it every day that said, "Nothing Unnecessary." I enjoyed multitasking and super-productivity. Then, early in my career, I got a review in which my boss pointed out that I was on a team. Relationships matter, too.  "Stop and smell the roses," he said. He respected my output but reminded me that efficiency can be a trap. 

 

In other words, as in much of life we need to find the Golden Mean.

 

Drucker famously said, "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." That staement should probably be taped to every office wall.

 

This takes discipline because effectiveness often requires saying no. No to distractions.
No to shiny new toys. No to strategies that are fashionable but misaligned with your mission.
No to activities that consume time but produce little value. 

 

In marketing especially, the temptation is to chase every new platform, every trend, every tactic, every algorithm change. 

 

But effective marketing begins with understanding your customer, understanding your message, and understanding your purpose. Only then does efficiency become meaningful. Otherwise, we risk becoming very busy while accomplishing very little.

 

The challenge for leaders today is not merely improving execution. It is developing the wisdom to distinguish between activity and progress. Because the marketplace ultimately does not reward businesses that are merely active. It rewards businesses that are effective.

A Few Thoughts On Listening

“Most of us find it easier to speak of the importance of an individual than to show it in practice by listening to one.”  
--Os Guinness In Two Minds

How much better this world could be if we would make even the most basic attempts to hear what others are saying, or are trying to say.

Listening is one of the rarest gifts we can offer another human being. We often assume that communication is primarily about speaking, persuading, explaining, or defending our ideas. Yet Os Guinness points us in a different direction. "Nothing speaks louder to a hungry man than a meal," he writes, "and nothing speaks more clearly to a doubter than the not speaking of genuine listening." Silence, when coupled with attention, can communicate respect, compassion, and understanding more powerfully than any argument. (I'm ashamed when I think back on certain memories where I did all the talking.) 

Most of us know what it feels like to be unheard. We have all experienced conversations in which the other person was merely waiting for a chance to speak. As Guinness observes, it is easier to talk about valuing people than it is to demonstrate that value by truly listening to them. Genuine listening requires patience, humility, and the willingness to set aside our own agenda for a moment.

Harry Nilsson captured this universal frustration in his lyric, "Everybody's talkin' at me, they don't hear a word I'm sayin'." In an age of constant noise, social media, and endless commentary, those words may be more relevant than ever.

Imagine how much healthier our families, friendships, workplaces, churches, and communities could become if we simply made a greater effort to hear what others are saying—or trying to say. Listening does not guarantee agreement, but it can foster understanding. And understanding is often the first step toward wisdom, reconciliation, and genuine human connection.

Original painting by the author

To See or Not To See, That Is the Question

To understand the world we live in, we must first see it as it is. Not as "trained" or manipulated to see it. Where do our ideas come from? Our ideas about God, about right and wrong, about how we should live... are they chosen, or... what?

                                                                         Journal note, Aug. 25, 1985

A long lost friend sent me this verse, with the follow up explanation:

I looked to see
What I thought I saw,
But what I saw
I did not see.

"How many times do you think you see something, then turn to look and what you thought you saw wasn't what you were really looking at; in the real sense of it. On a more philosophical angle, every day we see past what's real to what we want to see, but only when we make efforts to truly see things for what they are we realize it's not what we wanted to see. Our minds and hearts trick us every day into believing what isn't real." ~ S.P.

 

In the end, the question is not merely “To see or not to see,” but whether we possess the humility and discipline to look again—especially when the first glance flatters us or confirms what we already believe. Every inherited idea about God, morality, politics, or human purpose arrives pre-loaded with the fingerprints of culture, fear, comfort, and desire. The verse from my friend reminds us that our minds are masterful editors, cropping out inconvenient details and airbrushing reality until it matches the story we prefer.

The longer I live the more I've come to distrust the popular narratives we're all supposed to accept and believe.  The "Big Bang" theory? The Population Bomb? The global warming apocalypse? That we're descended from monkeys?

True sight is not a passive act but an act of rigorous reconsideration, and a willingness to admit we were wrong when or if it leads to that. It's uncomfortable, yet it is the only path that leads out of the hall of mirrors and into something solid enough to build a life upon.

And once we have tasted that unfiltered view—even briefly—we cannot unsee it without doing violence to our own integrity. My friend’s words linger as both warning and invitation: keep looking, keep turning your head, keep questioning the comforting shapes your heart insists are there. In a world drowning in curated illusions, the most radical thing any of us can do is to see what is actually in front of us, accept it for what it is, and then decide, with open eyes, how we shall then live.

Cancer & The Mind – The Emotional Toll

When Stephanie Sands shared her story with me it brought back memories from when I was pallbearer at my best friend's funeral in high school. I asked her permission to share her observations.

Cancer & The Mind – The Emotional Toll

I’ve recently been working with an AI system, running various tests that I won’t bore you with. One of our conversations prompted some genuine self-reflection, which led me back to Schitt’s Creek for a second viewing. This time, I learned something quite profound.

Cancer did not just change my body. It changed the emotional lens through which I experienced the world. One of the strangest things I noticed after my diagnosis was that I stopped finding many things funny. Humor began to feel distant, artificial, or emotionally disconnected from the reality I was living in. I just couldn’t relate. I found myself gravitating toward mystery, psychological dramas, thrillers, existential stories, and I did read books related to my illness, which I could relate to more easily.

When I was recovering in the hospital after my neck dissection and soft palate resection, I was reading When Breath Becomes Air. Looking back, that choice says a great deal about the psychological space I was in. I was not searching for escape. I was searching for honesty and relatability. The book did not avoid fear, mortality, uncertainty, or the collapse of assumed permanence. It confronted all of those things directly, and because of that, it felt emotionally real to me in a way that lighter material, like comedy, couldn’t do.

Cancer introduced me to this level of vulnerability that permanently altered how I interpreted stories, entertainment, and even other people. Before cancer, humor and ordinary entertainment were effortless to me; I never took the time to think about why that was, as there was no reason to. After cancer, especially during treatment and recovery, many forms of entertainment suddenly seemed shallow or emotionally unrelatable. My mind was no longer operating in the same psychological environment. I had crossed into a reality where scans determined my fate, pathology reports carried enormous emotional anxiety, and every follow-up appointment carried the possibility of life-changing news.

I think this changes a person’s relationship with storytelling. Serious illness strips away the illusion that life is stable or guaranteed. Psychological thrillers, mysteries, and existential dramas often feel more truthful after cancer because they acknowledge uncertainty. They accept that fear exists beneath ordinary life. They explore hidden danger, tension, mortality, and the fragility of human beings. Those themes no longer feel abstract after illness. They feel familiar.

I also feel cancer creates a kind of heightened psychological surveillance state. I constantly felt like I was on alert. After diagnosis and treatment, the mind becomes trained to search for hidden threats: recurrence, symptoms, scan results, side effects, changes in the body. In many ways, mystery and thriller narratives mirror that exact mental posture. They revolve around searching for hidden meaning beneath the surface, identifying danger before it fully reveals itself, and living with unresolved uncertainty. That emotional structure felt far more relatable to me than carefree comedy because I was living with that unresolved uncertainty.

At the same time, humor itself became more complicated. I don’t think I lost my sense of humor entirely. I think humor requires a certain feeling of safety and emotional distance that serious illness can temporarily destroy. When a person is confronting mortality, physical trauma, and possible disfigurement, or survival itself, the mind often becomes more focused on meaning than amusement. My mind was seeking depth, coherence, and emotional truth rather than a distraction.

Over time, I noticed that humor slowly began returning, but it returned differently. It no longer felt automatic or superficial. It felt more deliberate and more precious. There is something profound about laughing again after a person has lived through a period where laughter felt psychologically inaccessible. It changes the meaning of joy itself. When I was going through my first treatment, it seemed my cancer specialists were all watching Schitt’s Creek, and I could not relate to it at all. My husband watched it while I ended up reading something. 

Recently, I have been doing some self-reflection about other things that I had a difficult time understanding and forced myself into others’ shoes. This started with a technical exercise that expanded into more personal reflection. During this reflection, I thought I would just give Schitt’s Creek another chance, and I’m glad I did. I find it hilarious and extremely entertaining.

Cancer didn’t simply make me fear treatment, pain, and death. It reorganized my attention. It changed what felt emotionally authentic, what stories resonated with me, what subjects I could tolerate, and what felt honest. Reading When Breath Becomes Air in a hospital bed after major cancer surgery was not me indulging morbidity. It was me searching for understanding inside an experience that had stripped away many of the illusions I took for granted in life -- permanence, control, and the belief that life was guaranteed to remain recognizable.

* * * * *

A Torture Scene with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Last week I had a somewhat disturbing dream involving Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In the dream, Burton was being tortured by electroshocks. He was seated on a couch in which one cushion had been removed so that his body was on a metal plate. He was wearing a herringbone sport coat and semi-formal attire.  With limbs quivering, eyes ablaze with terror and fingers curled alongside his face, he looked like a terrified, helpless animal.  

On the far side of the room was a man in a lab coat fiddling with knobs like a studio engineer adjusting a soundboard.

Elizabeth Taylor, wearing an incongruous grin, was standing over her suffering prey looking triumphant. 

* * *

When I awoke, my first thought was about the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which featured a cruel, escalating  conflict between Taylor and Burton.

As I reflected further, a number of things came to mind, the first being: This was the not the purpose of bringing electricity into the world. One of electricity's benefits is light, electricity being a source of light in the world. It was not harnessed for the purpose of torturing people.

Looking into it further, I discovered that the Ancient Greeks noticed how rubbing amber produced static electricity. Ben Franklin linked electricity to lightning in 1752. Alessandro Volta created the first battery (1800), Michael Faraday later discovered electromagnetic induction (1831), enabling generation. Electricity exists in nature as electrons and charges; humans learned to harness it in the 18th–19th centuries.

What we see is that humans did not "create" electricity, they discovered it, and learned how to apply it.

In the late 19th century power lines began to appear. The first long-distance line was built to carry electricity between Williamette Falls and Portland, Oregon, a stretch of 13 miles. Within a matters of years high-voltage AC transmission enabled efficient delivery everywhere.

The advent of dedicated electric torture devices for interrogation appeared in the 1930s' The electric prod was purportedly first used by police in Argentina in 1932. Essentially it was a modified cattle prod that delivered high-voltage, low-amperage shocks to sensitive body areas for pain without killing its subjects.

Hand-cranked magneto/dynamo devices (from field telephones or car batteries) were used for shocks in various contexts by the 1940s, notably by French forces in colonial Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s, and in other places. 

The use of electricity for torture spread widely in the mid-20th century because it often leaves minimal visible marks, suiting regimes wishing to avoid scrutiny. It has since been documented in dozens of countries with devices like cattle prods, stun guns, and electrodes.

One of the shocking revelations of the Iraq War was our own use of electricity for torture and psychological coercion at Abu Ghraib prison. We denounced it as odious when Saddam Hussein was doing it, It's a shame our own nation dropped its own ethical standards in this pointless activity. We've been told all our lives that the ends don't justify the means. We also know that any information extracted by torture is unreliable. 

Sorry to be so depressing. 

"Man's inhumanity to man

makes countless thousands mourn."

--Robert Burns

If you're interested in learning about the history of electricity as a torture technology, click here.

 

Related Link

The National Stain Known as Gitmo

The Real Reason the U.S. Entered WWI: This Forgotten Telegram

Click to enlarge

Ask someone what brought America into World War I and chances are they will mention the Lusitania. The sinking of the British ocean liner in 1915 became one of the most powerful symbols of the war. "Remember the Lusitania" entered the public consciousness and remains there more than a century later.

Yet many historians argue that the Lusitania was not the decisive factor in bringing America into the conflict. That distinction belongs to a far less dramatic event: a coded telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico.

I first wrote about the Zimmermann Telegram in 2011. Most Americans have never heard of it. There were no torpedoes, no ships sunk, no tragic photographs of drowning civilians. There was only a message—intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence—proposing that if the United States entered the war against Germany, Mexico should join Germany and, in return, be offered the chance to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

When the contents became public in 1917, the political landscape shifted dramatically. The Zimmermann Telegram reminds us that history often turns on events that are invisible to the public at the time. The incidents we remember are not always the incidents that matter most. Which leads one to ask, what is really happening in the Middle East right now? Or closer to home for that matter?

* * *

During our year working at an orphanage in Mexico I learned a lot about our Southern neighbor and its history. At the time of the Zimmermann telegram, Mexico was in the midst of a ten year revolution, which culminated in the the country becoming a socialist state. 

During our 250 year history, Mexico underwent numerous revolutions. This last, and most significant, was the 1910 Mexican Revolution. To understand the political culture under the thirty year reign of Porfirio Diaz, think of the Plantation system of America's deep South, except things were even more lopsided. An estimated 800 to 1,000 wealthy families and foreign corporations owned roughly 97% of the country's cultivated land. This massive inequality—where millions of peasants were left landless—was the primary catalyst for Emiliano Zapata's revolutionary cry of “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty).

Related Links
The Zimmermann Telegram

The Last Days of Ambrose Bierce: Revisiting the Mystery

Brownsville Girl and The Old Gringo

The Boy in the Bubble: Our Perilous Postmodern Predicament (Revisited)

Each of us, whether conscious of it or not, lives inside a meta-narrative — a story that gives shape and meaning to our experience. These frameworks help us interpret suffering, progress, history, morality, identity, and hope itself. The songs we listen to, the books we read, the films we absorb, and the headlines that bombard us daily all reinforce or undermine these narratives.

The New World Encyclopedia defines a meta-narrative as: “A theory that tries to give a totalizing, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, and social or cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values.”

For centuries, the dominant Judeo-Christian meta-narrative placed God at the center of human history. Life had meaning because history itself had meaning — a beginning, a moral structure, and an end toward which humanity was moving.

Modernism gradually displaced this framework. The new narrative suggested that humanity no longer needed transcendence. Progress itself became the faith. Science, technology, education, democracy, medicine, and human ingenuity would build a brighter tomorrow. The future became our secular heaven.

But as the twentieth century, these Utopian visions encountered the reality of world wars, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, gulags, terrorism and alienation. The collapse of trust and the realization that technological advancement does not necessarily produce moral advancement became self-evident.

From these ruins Postmodernism emerged. It questioned whether progress was ever truly progress at all. It distrusted grand narratives entirely and hope itself became suspect.

It is in this sense that "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon feels so prophetic.

Listening to the song again recently, I was struck by its architecture. The verses arrive like fragments from a newsfeed: terrorism, drought, celebrity spectacle, scientific breakthroughs, violence, medicine, wealth, and technological marvels. The modern world flashes before us in disconnected images.

-- A bomb in a baby carriage.
-- A baby with a baboon heart.
-- Lasers in the jungle.
-- These are the days of miracle and wonder.

And after each unsettling verse comes the refrain: “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.”

But the reassurance feels hollow, which is the genius of the song. The Boy in the Bubble captures the emotional contradiction of late modernity — astonishing technological achievement paired with spiritual exhaustion and civilizational anxiety. The narrator seems convinced that technological wonder should somehow compensate for spiritual dislocation. Look at all we can do, he insists. Look at the miracles. Look at the progress.

Yet beneath the surface lies exhaustion and dread. The one being comforted appears to understand something the narrator cannot: human beings can surround themselves with spectacle and still feel abandoned. We can cure diseases, transplant organs, photograph distant galaxies, and instantaneously transmit information across the planet — yet remain spiritually adrift. The modern world increasingly resembles a giant illuminated carnival trembling atop a void. 

One thing that makes the song enduring is how it captures the emotional texture of postmodern life long before social media intensified it. Today we scroll endlessly through catastrophe, innovation, entertainment, outrage, tragedy, and distraction in one continuous stream. We are flooded with information yet starving for coherence.

Even the most amazing reels soon leave us bored. Nothing satisfies.

And what makes the song so incredibly pointed is that while the narrator doesn't see it, the one he's trying to comfort sees it perfectly. She's not only crying because of the brokenness of the world but because the one who seeks to comfort her is so oblivious to it. It's like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in which the narrator tells the whole story, yet can't see that which is plain to everyone who hears his tale. Listen to this song several times and hear the painfulness in his appeal at the end of each verse. 

We reassure one another with the language of progress while quietly sensing that something essential has gone missing. Perhaps that is why the song still haunts listeners nearly forty years later. It understands that our crisis is not merely political or technological. It is metaphysical.

The Boy In The Bubble

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shopwindows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turnaround jump shot
It’s everybody jumpstart
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Thinking of the Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
a loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires, and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry

© 1986 Words and Music by Paul Simon and Forere Mothoeloa