The Greatest Non-Decision Ever Not Made

So today, we'll take a very close look at how a lack of critical thinking can become a gigantic mistake, an irretrievable opportunity.

Strong words, stick with me.

I'm about to tell you about the greatest non-decision ever well, ever not made the greatest non-decision ever not made I have a friend who says there's nothing worse than a great idea that doesn't get used. Well, here we go folks You know the landscape The escape of history is strewn with the detritus of bad decisions.

There was the Trojan War, Chamberlain's appeasement, the Bay of Pigs, the Ford Edsel, Francis Maginot Line, and Kodak's denial that digital photography would replace film.

More unimaginably, in July of 1962, DECA Records rejected the Beatles in favor of Brian Poole and the Tremolos.

Yikes.

Passing through history, we step over the rubble of bad decisions. That's routine. But once in a while, we find a massive boulder, not of a bad decision, but worse, of a non-decision that should have been made, that a first-year business student could have made.

This is the story of one of those non-decisions, one of the greatest of all non-decisions ever not made, if not the greatest.

On July 26th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Postal System.

Benjamin Franklin good old Benjamin Franklin again the original American was its first postmaster general and for the next 200 years or so neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stayed these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

That pledge remained a certainty, basically for one reason.

The Post Office had no competitors to speak of, or at least ones that they could see.

They saw no reason to examine their business, they just kept doing it. And they still do, despite the attempt by the current administration to dismantle it.

That was 1775 when it was begun.

Fast forward 1970.

The Postal Reorganization Act transformed the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service, an independent agency. The problem was, although it wasn't perceived as a problem then, that the government provided robust subsidies, making the United States Postal Service a quasi-public, quasi-private organization and making it less clear how to run it. Do we run it for profit or surplus? That's a big difference.

The lurking danger was not from traditional mail carriers, it was from email and then from newer electronic messaging modes. But who in 1970 could imagine that?

Who could imagine that in 2025, there would be four and a half billion users sending 450 to 500 billion emails a day and counting? Are you starting to pick up on where somebody missed the boat here?

Who could see cell phones coming with nearly 100 % of all smartphone users sending an average of 50 texts per day? Who could have imagined 2 billion WhatsApp users by 2019 growing by half a billion every two years. Who could have imagined 65 billion WhatsApp messages daily?

Really, who could have imagined any of that?

Well, Queen Elizabeth, for one, that's who.

Throughout history, there were precursors to email. The Telegraph, for instance, which was the first time in history a message could be sent without having to physically deliver it.

Telegraph, then, was the first telecommunications breakthrough.

Years later, it was telex, which was very big.

The very first example of an email type message in 1965 is on the computer at MIT.

In 1969, it was sent on the ARPANET system.

Then in 1971, American computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email using the at symbol on ARPANET, a test to see if two computers could exchange messages. And it was a success.

Email was born, and the newly reorganized United States Postal Service should have seen the opportunity, not to mention the threat.

If ever there were a time for a SWOT analysis, that was it.

Someone should have said we're in the mail business and this is what mail will look like therefore we must be vigilant we must enter the email business we must enter the email business someone should have said that would have been a breakaway slam dunk but would have taken the kind of thinking done by a profit-driven, market-focused company, not the kind of provincial thinking of a quasi-government agency.

On March 26, 1976, Queen Elizabeth II, yep, that Queen Elizabeth, using the ARPANET, became the first head of state to use email for official purposes. services.

Not long thereafter, Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign used email, and then Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to use email in office, responding in 1994 to an email from Sweden's prime minister.

Where was the United States Postal Service? Where were they? Nowhere.

At the same time, a parade of companies saw things differently.

See if you remember any of these. Lycos, Netscape, CompuServe, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Juno, So Prodigy, Earthlink, remember a couple of them, all of them?

One after another, they got into the business. Many are gone, and some of them are on their way out, but that's business.

At least they were competing for the future.

The last United States Postal Service surplus was in 2006, 20 years ago.

Since then, losses have totaled more than $100 billion. These past 20 years of bleeding can be easily explained, and it's not because the United States Postal Service is obligated to set aside nearly $6 billion annually for retirement benefits.

Many large companies do that, and they don't lose $100 billion.

It's because the incalculable revenues that could have been theirs for the taking in the early years of email and during the subsequent advances in messaging, not to mention Tim Berners-Lee's new World Wide Web, which would have more than covered those costs. office, they were never remotely considered as a growth opportunity, let alone a new business model.

The question again, where was the United States Postal Service when the new forms of what they've been doing since 1775 were all around them?

But what if the post office did make the decision to get into email 50 years ago and they could have that's when queen elizabeth sent her email and everything was beginning to develop but what's worse not only did the postal service not get into the email business they gave it away yours for the taking nice little counter display all you have to do is pick one up bring it home and install it on your computer and off you went and the post office was allowing it to happen on their grounds this was worse than the fact that it was happening somewhere else and coming to get you.

It happened on the post office's ground. You walked in to mail a letter, which at the time may have been 13 cents or something like that.

And you walked home with the ammunition to compete against the post office for the same process. Mail. Walk into the post office, mail a letter, take home a kit, install it on a computer, and start doing business with someone else.

And you'd be doing that business for years until the business caught up with you and started handing out free email addresses.

But at first, you were taking that home, putting it on your computer and signing up with AOL for a monthly fee, which rose every several months.

On the post office's grounds, you would have been raking in the monthly fees and advertising all kinds of other joint partnership ventures of the United States Postal Service with banks, sporting leagues, partnership ventures, or with travel and leisure companies like hotels, airlines, and cruise ships. it would have been all yours and if that hundred and some odd billion dollars in profits that could have been made would have been made how different would the United States Postal Service have become at the beginning of this little riff I told you that I was going to give you perhaps the greatest non-decision ever made kick it around, see what you think I still think it is let's take a break let's hear from our generous and friendly answers and i'll be right back and now a word from our sponsor bergen volunteers vantage point is brought to you by bergen volunteers since 1966 they have been quietly at work in bergen county neighbors helping neighbors across 70 towns.

They mentor kids who need someone in their corner and they help seniors stay independent at home. And through Bergen Leeds, they have trained hundreds of people to lead in their own communities.

Nobody there waits for the perfect plan. They see what a town needs and they go and do it. That is critical thinking with the sleeves rolled up as they call it. And that is exactly right. To everyone at Bergen Volunteers, thank you for supporting this show and thank you for the work you do you can learn more about them online that's bergenvolunteers.org I am back I keep telling you I will be and I always am just so add me being back to death and taxes you can be sure of it I've got two aphorisms for you today and they're more introspective personally than many of them But aphorism number one, don't envy anyone anything.

You already have all you need.

And aphorism number two, when we let go of who we are, we can become who we might be. A lot to think about. let me go through my great minds talking about somebody whom I mentioned twice before today, do you know the name Tim Berners-Lee again, this is a name that I'll bet you 100 people in the room, not 50 go up when I ask, do you know him but everybody on this planet should know his name like they know Bill Gates or Jonas Salk or Pele Tim Berners-Lee is the guy who created the internet the world wide web he was an English computer scientist working in the 1980s in Switzerland and he started to envision a site out there in the Ethernet and then another site and another a thousand more and a hundred thousand more and a million more and that these were a bunch of sites needed to be connected and he started to draw on his chalkboard a site and then a line between the two of them and you can see a mesh developing which Tim Berners-Lee initially called the World Wide Mesh that's not nearly as catchy as the World Wide Web WWW as a matter of fact he was going along saying that's what I'm going to call this baby it's going to be the worldwide mesh until some friends of his played around with them a little bit and showed him the wisdom of creating the world wide web now in a cute twist to this but very important berners-lee asked himself the question if i'm going to have all these sites all over the universe.

What do I do to help proliferate that?

And his answer, equally brilliant, if I build my site, which will be the first one ever built, and make it useful to everybody else, that's what the world needs from me. And what he did was he built his first web page was a one-page site with instructions on how to build a website.

Couldn't be any more simple. If you dream about a worldwide web with millions and billions of people and locations, you got to help him do it. And so he did. It was a one-page last episode, the one before this one. I talked about traits of people, important traits for people in the 21st century. One of them was altruistic, problem-centered, outside oneself. Well, there it is.

Perfect example.

Tim Berners-Lee.

I encourage you to look him up a most interesting guy but we live more in Tim Berners-Lee world than we do in Bill Gates' world we live more in his world than virtually anyone else he built this world than we are functioning in and he was almost going to call it the worldwide mesh thanks for listening go back and consider the world's greatest non-decision ever not made and see how you feel about it we'll be back in about three days we've got lots to talk about especially the latest developments of AI over the last week We'll be back at you with all of that and more.

In the meantime, thanks for listening. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.