The Better Blog

Amid all the talk about “opening up the economy,” there’s one big question. How? Imagine you’re the owner of a fitness club. The CoronaCrisis shutdown has nearly destroyed your business, with most of your customers canceling their gym memberships, but you’ve managed to stay afloat. Now you can finally, cautiously open up your club again.… Read More…

In a nutshell: Blockchain will streamline and simplify our supply chains by making one global ledger — like a shared spreadsheet — that will track everything. Here’s how it works. One of the many mystifying parts of the pandemic: why are we running out of toilet paper? It’s not like people are using the toilet… Read More…

In a nutshell: Blockchain bonds (also known as digital bonds) are like regular bonds, but faster, easier, and more interesting. Instead of buying and selling pieces of paper, they are issued and traded on the blockchain.   In a New York Times article entitled What New York Looked Like During the 1918 Flu Pandemic, you… Read More…

This is a messy time. It is neither clean nor elegant. It is quick and dirty. Many of us are moving things forward as fast as we can, on multiple fronts, our days a blur of back-to-back Zoom meetings. (Every day seems like Blursday.) Every day we’re improvising new solutions. Some of them work; some… Read More…

We won the grant. Citizens Bank has received a generous $15,000 grant from Citizens Bank in recognition of our work on the Coronavirus Communication (CoCo) campaign [see the press release here]. Once again: your voice is stronger than you think. In just a month, our hashtags like #HealthcareHeroes and #NewNormal have reached over 175 million… Read More…

Did you know the Spanish Flu probably didn’t start in Spain? The famous pandemic of 1918, on the heels of World War I, was far deadlier and more terrifying than Coronavirus. It infected 500 million people, or about a third of the world’s population. Experts are divided on whether it began in France, China, Britain,… Read More…

Admiral James Stockdale was held as a Prisoner of War for seven years. Today, he gives us an excellent lesson for Coronavirus Communication. In 1965, Stockdale was flying a mission over North Vietnam when his plane was struck down. He parachuted into a small village, where he was severely beaten and imprisoned in the terrible… Read More…

In a New York Times article entitled What New York Looked Like During the 1918 Flu Pandemic, you can see historical photos that look eerily familiar to today: New Yorkers wearing masks, public health bulletins advising people to cover their sneezes, and graphs showing mortality “curves.” One image from this article has seared itself onto… Read More…

“But princess, the peasants are starving. They have no bread.” “Then let them eat cake.“ – Marie Antoinette (according to legend)   During the Great Depression, it was common to see long queues of people at food banks and soup kitchens:   Compare this with video of people waiting in line for help at a… Read More…

Images have immense power. We’ve talked about the power of the famous Tiananmen Square photo, where an anonymous protestor stood before military tanks, representing the power we all have as individuals to bring about change: Over the weekend, this happened: If you live in America, you really don’t need anyone to explain this photo to… Read More…