The Harbus is Harvard Business School’s student newspaper. The weekly publication theoretically covers a broad range of issues of high topical relevance to the students at the school.

…But you wouldn’t know that. Because nobody reads The Harbus.

I think I can fix that.

The overarching problem here is a little weird to explain. I’ll try: Nobody reads The Harbus because nobody reads The Harbus. Make sense?

Framed a little differently, I might call the problem something like “The Watercooler Effect.” The value of the paper is largely only as good as the number of people you can discuss it with. From a business school perspective, you might more simply describe this as a “network effect.”

Problem #1: Distribution

The Harbus is distributed around campus at most of high-traffic areas. I don’t really know all of the locations I where I can pick it up, currently. It feels kind of erratic. There’s a rack by the downstairs dining hall, but not by the upstairs location. There’s a rack by the entrance of the gym, because…I guess some people want to read the newspaper while they’re lifting weights?

When the latest issue is released, there are usually GINORMOUS piles on the racks. And when I see a ginormous pile, I get the impression that nobody’s been picking anything up. So there’s that disincentive, too.

If I can’t really tell where the paper is available to be picked up, or really predict if there will be copies left by the time I get there, it’s going to be awfully hard for me to become a loyal reader.

Solution #1: No racks anymore. Distribute one copy (900 total) of the Harbus to every single RC (1st year) desk.

Here’s why this is great: First, it instills a sense of ownership. Even though I had no say in the matter, the paper that showed up on my desk feels like it’s mine. Don’t take it!

On a related note, this system instills a sense of scarcity. If an EC (2nd year) wants to read a copy of this week’s Harbus, she has to steal it.

You might think that dropping off 900 individual copies is a lot of hard work, but really, it’s not. I know this because half of the student groups at HBS send a member out once every few weeks to drop quarter sheets off on every single RC desk. It takes a few minutes per room, and all of the rooms are in the exact same building. With a small team you could be done in less than half an hour.

Speaking of which…

Problem #2: The Content                                   

It’s crazy to me that The Harbus is theoretically a perfect medium to reach students with information about upcoming events, and yet, NO student group advertises in the paper and EVERY student group is happy to print and distribute its own aforementioned quarter sheets.

For an editorial team, it’s really hard to create compelling content when you’ve only got 4 pages to work with because you don’t sell enough ads for anything bigger.

As far as I can tell, student groups have preposterous budgets for senseless stuff.

Solution #2: Some kind of program where the ad in the first issue of the year is free for every student group. This gets them into the habit of placing ads in the paper, and gets them in the habit of promoting the paper on their own, and makes the first issue of the year huge, and gets students interested in the magazine out of the gate.

Advertising in the paper should be a no-brainer for student clubs, once you’re mirroring the distribution routes they’re already practicing and can reasonably mirror the costs as well.

That all said: The ads are only half of the content. The other half is the words in the actual columns on the page.

Solution #2B: Mindful that the Harbus is now an RC-only magazine, we can now safely create content that is HYPER specific to RC life at HBS. (As an outsider, you might be surprised at how different 1st and 2nd year are.) Regular content such as:

• Notes from ECs about RC cases (which all 900 RC’s will be reading) for the upcoming week.
• Satire comments that can be used.
• A schedule and map of official and unofficial events that are coming up from HBS, and in greater Boston.
• Reader-submitted 1- or 2- sentence reflections on last week’s cases.
• Professor-submitted reflections on last week’s cases.
• Guidance on RC time- or season-relevant events (winter formal: buying a tux? finding a date? february recruiting: tips? horror stories? etc.) from ECs.
• And so on.

In fact: Making the content RC-specific would actually probably be even MORE interesting for EC students than the current general-use paper. As an EC, I’d have loved the opportunity every week to reflect intimately on my experience from last year.

Problem #3: The Medium

Newsprint sucks. A newspaper is a big, clunky thing. Impossible to open, flip through, read on the go. Especially when the entire thing is only like 4-8 pages long.

Solution #3: Maybe I’m biased, but I think they should switch to magazine format. Heck. Make it look like an HBS case. Something that’s more culturally relevant, has more staying power. Something that you might save and look back on. Besides, I’d assume that the school has some sort of advantageous economies of scale for prices on printing in the case format.

There is one distinct benefit of The Harbus being in its current format, which is that it’d be much easier for professors to enforce not reading it in class–much more difficult to obfuscate the rattle of shuffling newsprint pages around, compared to the relative ease of covertly and tranquilly flipping through pages of cases.

I think much of everything else can still stay the same. I don’t see a problem with ECs being the Editors-in-Chief of an RC paper. I don’t see fundamental shifts in staffing requirements. I don’t think the new format necessarily prohibits the paper from pursuing tangential interviews that volunteer journalists are interested in writing — chatting with a famous business person visiting campus, recapping their section’s last retreat or exploits on the field for intramural soccer, etc.

Ultimately: Our goal is to make the paper more attractive to potential advertisers. With a highly pointed audience, and relevant & predictable content, this should be infinitely easier to accomplish. Exploratory articles of different parts of town should draw advertisements from local bars and restaurants. Culturally relevant pieces on social events should draw business from requisite facilitators (Who should I call if I want a tuxedo for upcoming formal? If I want to rent a party bus like this party that was described in the last article?)

Of course, instead of all of that, the Harbus could just work to really flesh out its social media presence and try to accrue a lot of Twitter followers and hopefully that will work out.

I think Dentists are the best marketers of the health world.

Off the top of my head:

• There are only two checkups that you’re generally expected to get on at least an annual basis, regardless of your actual state of health: Go to your doctor, and go to your dentist. They’re the only two medical professionals who send cute little reminder notes out in the mail which say “don’t forget your checkup, it’s been six months!”
• I think far more than any other specialty, there are a prolific number of substantial, expensive, and increasingly common procedures that dentists perform. Everyone gets braces. Everyone gets cavities filled. Plenty of people get wisdom teeth pulled.
• It’s common knowledge that you’re supposed to devote 5-10 minutes, twice a day, SPECIFICALLY to taking care of (brushing) your teeth. Innuendo aside, there’s no other part of your body that receives this kind of dedicated attention.
• Of the library of possible medical maladies, I think having serious tooth trouble is by far the least embarrassing. Which means I’m both most likely to talk about it with my friends, and I’m also most likely to actually do something about it when I see a dentist. Think about how different your reaction would be if you heard that a friend is seeing a dentist regularly versus seeing a psychiatrist regularly. Think about how likely you are to respond if you’re advised to see a dentist for a mouth problem compared to seeing a psychiatrist for a brain problem.

Which leads me to the following line of questions: Why not annual checkups with your family psychologist? Why not nightly 5 minute stretch routines prescribed by your long-time physical therapist?

And more centrally: Are we really just that poor at taking care of our teeth, or were the founding fathers of dentistry just really exceptional businessmen?

(Another cross-post from my Launching Tech Ventures class. Original here.)

Ultimately, ironically, you might argue that salespeople have done a terrible job of selling “sales” as a concept. In my best estimation, here are the four biggest reasons why you, why schools, and why the business community at large all think that sales sucks.

First problem: It’s not “sexy.” Heck, it’s not even “neutral.” We look down on salespeople. We use descriptors like greedy, untrustworthy, you name it.

My two foremost experiences with sales professionals really stick out in my head. On the one hand: Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, whose job leaves him lonely, delusional, lacking many real skills, and altogether out of touch with reality. On the other: Mr. Wormwood, the dad in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, who is slimy, dishonest, and basically the worst dad ever.

Who’d ever want to be a salesperson with this as a foundation? I don’t think I’ve even once read a story where a salesperson saved a life, was a hero, or even just did something remarkably creative and fun in their line of work.

Second problem: There’s a notion that sales is kind of exclusively for people who really, really care about money. You can aspire to pretty much any other job (even ones that pay exceedingly well) without money being your number one priority. Does every Private Equity financier care exclusively about their bottom line? I think the majority seek this line of work because it’s a language and a setting they’re comfortable with.

Sales jobs all seem to all rely very, very heavily on commissioned compensation structures, metrics, and quotas. It seems like it’s very hard to just do sales because you love to work with customers and love to uncover and solve their problems.

Third problem: The notion that it’s hard to teach sales and far more effective to just go out and practice. I really don’t see how this is any truer for sales than it is for marketing, for entrepreneurship, for strategy, for coding, and probably for finance, too.

For sales, you have frameworks and tools which you can teach and can help guide students’ thinking. How to write a call script. How to do an elevator pitch. How to go from cold call to initial visit to closed deal to follow up. How to write emails that prompt readership and timely response. All theories which are admittedly sort of half baked. They’re effective in a vacuum, but only applicable in a limited capacity in any real-world environment—for sure, you wouldn’t create the same sorts of scripts whether you sold kids toys or financial planning.

Isn’t this the same stuff as the 5 C’s and 4 P’s of marketing? All we’re missing is for somebody clever to come up with neat acronyms. (Better than Alec Baldwin’s A.B.C.)

Fourth problem: The notion that you’re either a born sales person or you’re not. The reality: nobody is a born salesperson any more than they’re a born doctor. Just like everything else on the planet, you learn how to do sales through exposure and practice. Probably for months or years. Some people seem like natural salespeople because they practiced on the playground in grade school. I think it’s natural for us to be afraid of sales, for much the same reason I’d be terrified to perform surgery in an operating room.

Conclusion: I guess if you were to take the above at face value, you might think I’m suggesting we need to blow up the entire sales ecosystem. We’d need to write children’s stories, create completely new compensation structures, and develop entire lines of academia so that we might begin to award sales doctorates.

I’m not that crazy.

For now, all I hope that we might take away is a better understanding of why sales is given the rough shake that it is. From that new perspective, I hope we might become more open to learning and working with an incredibly powerful set of trade skills.

Forget “sales” as you know it. Learn how to be a Customer Problem Solver, instead. Start by picking up Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People or Spencer Johnson’s One Minute $alesperson.

You know this screen. If you’re like many smartphone users, you probably see it hundreds of times a day. This is the protection that your smartphone affords you from friends, strangers, and general miscreants who want access into your phone for who knows what.

And I think it’s a huge waste of time and energy.

First, a few questions:

1. What on earth are you hiding? Are you married and checking up on your AshleyMadison account? Take considering a screen lock as an easy wake-up call: You don’t need password protection. What you DO need to address the source of the problem: the fact that you’re doing something totally inappropriate.
2. Are you worried that a friend or significant other might want to peek in for some reason? Please. None of your friends care about your email history. Even if they did (or, even if you’re just paranoid of as much), you’re again not addressing the source of the problem. (Hint: Your friends are creeps. Time to find new ones.)Alternatively, assuming we’re in some bizarro world and they do want to have access, you think a 4-digit code is going to stop them?Here’s what your obsessive counterparty is thinking: A) I can probably just figure out your phone unlock key by hanging out with you and peering over your shoulder (in fact, I can prompt this by just sending you a text message while I’m standing in front of you). B) I could probably just ask you for your code. What, you’re hesitant about telling me, your trusted friend/significant other what your phone unlock key is? What does that imply about what you’re actually doing on there? (See #1 above.)
3. You’re worried about a burglar or something? Stop watching so much CSI. You’re not that important. If your phone gets stolen, the thief probably doesn’t care at all who you are. He’s probably going to factory reset the phone and then sell it on eBay. And if he really wanted to get inside, I’m sure there are an infinity of ways to bypass this lock by Googling the problem.

A few other observations:

1. Imagine doing this with other personal identity things you own. Would you want a 4-digit unlock key for your credit card every time you wanted to buy some groceries? I mean, theoretically the same burglary/identity theft issues still apply. How paranoid would you need to be?
2. You know what else is generally four digits long? Your pass key for your ATM card is usually four numbers. As is the answer to many identity-verifying questions used when you’re talking to credit card / banking / etc. companies on the phone (for example (obviously), “What are the last four digits of your social security number?”).Many people don’t have the mental capacity to hold on to more than one important 4-digit number in their life. So now, with your screen unlock, you’ve created the opportunity to telegraph something that may ACTUALLY be sensitive and valuable to an identity thief / maniacal S.O.

Let’s look at how much this is destroying your life.

Here’s an article  that says the average person checks their phone about 150 times a day. I’m sure this figure fluctuates wildly depending on whether or not you’re a psychotic teenage girl (though, given our understanding above, it’s likely that you are). 150 might sound high at first, but if you think about it, given ~19 waking hours (~7 hours of sleep), that’s checking your phone 7.9 times an hour. That’s entirely plausible. If not conservative.

We’ll say it takes, what, all of 2 seconds to pass through the unlock screen? Fine. That’s 5 minutes (300 seconds) you spend unlocking every day. Or 1.27 entire 24-hour days (109,500 seconds) every year that you’re exhausting just by nonsensically punching your 4-digit security code into your cell phone.

(…By comparison: I wrote this entire blog post and managed to only waste about 75 minutes.)