110 DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE
It would take the entire population of the earth—about
six billion—each of us working a handheld calculator at the
rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do
what Roadrunner can do in one day.
If it were possible for cars to improve their gas mileage
over the past decade at the same rate that supercomputers
have improved their cost and efficiency, we’d be getting
200,000 miles to the gallon today.^6The comparisons were compelling and caught the attention of
the media. Conduct a Google search for “IBM + Roadrunner +
1.5 miles” and the search returns nearly twenty thousand links
to articles that use IBM’s comparison word for word from the
press release. The analogy works.$700 BILLION BAILOUT
The bigger the number, the more important it is to place the
number into a context that makes sense to your audience. For
example, in October 2008, the U.S. government bailed out banks
and financial institutions to the tune of $700 billion. That’s the
numeral 7 followed by eleven zeros, a number so large that few
of us can get our minds around it. San Jose Mercury News reporter
Scott Harris put the number into a context his Silicon Valley
readers could understand: $700 billion is twenty-five times the
combined wealth of the Google guys. It is the equivalent of 350
billion venti lattes at Starbucks or 3.5 billion iPhones. The gov-
ernment could write checks for $2,300 to every man, woman,
and child in America or provide free education for twenty-three
million college students. Few people can grasp the concept of
700 billion, but they know lattes and college tuitions. Those
numbers are specific and relevant.^7CHIPPING DOWN $13 TRILLION
Environmental groups go to great lengths to make numbers
more meaningful. They must if they hope to persuade individ-
uals to break deeply ingrained habits and routines that might
contribute to damaging climate change. The numbers are sim-
ply too big (and seemingly irrelevant) without connecting the