Steal your business model. We don't have a shortage of business models, it's okay if you pick one that's already working for someone else.
Steal your web design. There will always be enough people brave enough to invent whole new ways of interacting online. But unless you're an interaction designer or your business model depends on something new, do us all a favor and use something that already works.
Steal your tools. You probably don't need to build a new email delivery engine, a new overnight shipping method or a new way to run payroll. Once someone has a reliable, cost-effective building block, feel free to use it.
When it comes down to the thing you will be known for, your uniqueness, your gift, your thing worth talking about–don't steal that. Writers shouldn't steal words from other writers, and chemists have no need to steal the research of other chemists. Sure, go ahead and invent.
For the rest, honor those that came before and use their work as a building block for yours.
April 12, 2014
The traveling salesman, the carnival barker and the old-time businessman can hit and run. Make the sale, cut your costs, move on.
Today, though, in the connection economy, two huge factors are at work:
1. Subscription. The lifetime value of a customer is high and getting higher. You might buy $50,000 from one grocery store over time. If you own an inkjet printer, it might come to a thousand dollars a year in toner expenses, with a profit margin approaching 90%…
2. Spreading the word. Every customer is also a media outlet and a publisher if she chooses to be. That means that unhappy news spreads far and fast (and that remarkable products and services need lower ad budgets).
But this seems to be almost impossibly difficult for companies to embrace. A simple example:
HP offers inkjet printers at a slight loss, knowing that over time, they'll more than make it back in high-priced toner. When a customer shows up at their website then, searching for a new feature like eprinting or getting their wireless to work, it's both an opportunity and warning sign. Drop this ball and it costs thousands of dollars in lost profit.
At every step along the journey, HP drops the ball. The website, knowing my model and serial number, shows me pictures with instructions that don't match my printer. The site won't let me into the chat support window, because my printer is out of warranty. And when I call, they put me on hold and then route me to an overseas call center. After fifteen minutes, I'm told, "your printer is obsolete, you should buy a new one."
The thing is, a customer is never out of warranty, even if his product is.
Twenty minutes ago, HP knew everything they needed to know to tell me that I needed to buy a new printer. Think of all the ways they could have used this as an opportunity to make it more likely that the new printer would be an HP printer. Instead, they punished me for a quarter of an hour and then demanded I buy something new. They broke the chain.
Sure, I had to buy something, so I bought a Canon.
Of course, it's entirely possible that Canon's support is no better, but that's not the point. Every time the chain is broken, value is lost. I lose value, they lose value.
Think of the interaction at the deli counter or the pump or the bursar's office or the alumni office or on the website from the point of view of the customer and the chain. Where are the moments where you might lose her forever? What are the key places where you need to intervene and invest in the relationship instead of milk it, or drag it through the mud? Assuming that your competitors are just as selfish and metric-driven as you are isn't a great strategy, because you're still losing when you break the chain.
Support is not a cost center, it's a profit center. Treating customers with urgency and clarity and respect (maintaining the chain) is more urgent than ever. But companies are busy measuring time on the phone or cost per hour of support people instead of even trying to measure customer churn.
Think lifetime, all the time.
April 11, 2014
Internet companies often strive for lock in.
Lock in is what happens once you have a lot of followers on Twitter… it's not easy to switch. Same with all social networks. And operating systems too–it takes a lot of hassle to walk away from iOS.
Once a company has achieved lock in, one way to grow is to appeal to those that haven't been absorbed (yet), to change the product to make it appeal to people who need it to be simpler, dumber and less powerful, because (the company and its shareholders understand) the power of the network becomes ever more irresistible as it scales.
Do the math. Given a choice between serving existing users that are looking for a more powerful tool or creating more simplicity and ease for the newbies, which pays bigger dividends to the network's owners?
And so the information density and power of your phone's operating system goes down, not up. The tools available on various sites become easier to use, but less appealing to those that made the site work in the first place. (This isn't new, of course. The same thing could be said for the design of chainsaws, edgy retail stores and most sports cars too).
That leads to a pretty common cycle of power-user dissatisfaction. The people who care the most leave first.
The question today is: has lock in (due to social network power) become so powerful that power users can't leave, even if they're tired of being treated like people who marketers seem to believe want something too-simple* and dumb? Without a doubt, networks yearn to be bigger and more inclusive. The challenge is to do that without losing what made them work.
What do networks owe the users who made them powerful in the first place?
*too-simple is not the same as simple. Simple is good, because it enables power. Too-simple prevents it.
April 10, 2014
Ideas used to be nicely wrapped up, wrapped in movies or books or some other sort of container. The Harvard Business Review and Fast Company would collect a bunch of them in one handy, easy to carry package. And the way we found those ideas was by going to the place where the containers lived and grabbing one. The bookstore was a valuable showroom for worthy ideas.
Today, ideas spread. We find them from someone we trust, or as they flash across the sky of social media. Today, people with authority and leverage continue to need new and important ideas, but there isn't an obvious idea store to go and pick up the next one. Instead, we listen to the pulse of what's going on around us, and see who is talking about what.
Those conversations are the string. Curious people will follow the string all the way back to the place it came from.
Attaching a piece of string to your idea is the updated equivalent of getting it placed in the right part of the bookstore. Attaching a string and putting it in a place where it can move from person to person.
A string by itself is worthless, a waste of time, an internet amusement.
An idea without a string might be valuable, but it won't change much, because no one will find it.
Now we need both.
April 9, 2014
Has it ever been easier to experience an emotion at the click of a mouse? It's a choice.
You can instantly become enraged, merely by reading the comments of some blogs. You can amplify your self-doubt by checking out what the trolls on Twitter have just said about you. And if you're really interested in bringing yourself down, go read some reviews of your work online.
Sure, if you want an argument, it's easy to find a never-ending one online.
The question is, why would you want to?
April 8, 2014
Talking with Krista Tippett about art and work that matters.
The new ebook about placebos.
Stop Stealing Dreams, on what school is for. (Translations and more are here).
The world's worst boss.
On critics.
April 7, 2014
Five behaviors that often come clumped together, each conspiring to lead you toward disappointment:
Big dreams: The goal isn't consistent impact or meaningful work, it's a huge hit, the star turn and the ability to change the world. It wouldn't be enough to have 1000 true fans, the big dreamer wants a stadiumful in every town.
Poor work habits: Flitting from project to project, waiting for inspiration to arrive, stalling, not taking lessons, repeating the same early steps over and over…
Shortcut seeking: Why bother with the long route when you can find a shorter, faster path? Get-rich-quick schemes, insider access and the quest to get it right now.
Lottery thinking: This is a variation of shortcut thinking, but it involves getting picked. One person, one organization, one Wizard of Oz who will magically make it all happen.
Lack of self-awareness: The self-delusion that your stuff is in fact world-class, and that the critics, all of them that you've managed to interrupt, are wrong.
Just for kicks, imagine someone who embraces the opposite of all five of these behaviors. Someone focused on doing the work, her work, relentlessly getting better, shipping it, racking up small wins and earning one fan at a time. And doing it all with a trained eye on what it means to do it better.
Hard to imagine a better shot at making a difference.
Which people do you look to for criticism? Which metrics are you relying on to tell you if you're doing a good job? Who tells you if you're on to something?
Alas, most of us usually look in the wrong place.
Here are a few you might want to avoid:
- easy-to-quantify and common metrics that lack granularity or insight (like pageviews, followers and heaven-forfend, likes)
- critics who are loud, snarky and/or jealous
- self-appointed gatekeepers looking for more power
- the mass market
- … the media they rely on for their opinion [including sportscasters and news anchors (in any field)]
- people who never understand or appreciate work that's important and new
- the cool kids
Change someone who cares.
April 6, 2014
They're not the same, in fact, they couldn't be much more different.
Search is what we call the action of knowing what you want and questing until you ultimately find it. Duckduckgo is a search engine that is mostly invisible–tell it what you want, here it is.
Discovery, on the other hand, is what happens when the universe (or an organization, or a friend) helps you encounter something you didn't even know you were looking for. (I had originally typed find but then replaced it with encounter. Search is such a dominant paradigm that we use search-related words even when we don't intend to.)
Amazon and Google have done an incredible job of providing the answer to search. It's not obvious, though, that we've made nearly as much progress in helping people discover ideas, hidden gems, friends, opportunities, places, important issues or the truth (about anything).
Are you working to help your clients, patrons, customers and colleagues find what they already know what they want? Or teaching and encouraging them to find something they didn't know they needed?
Seems like a huge opportunity.
April 5, 2014
It seems as though profit-maximizing business people ought to be speaking up loudly and often for three changes in our culture, changes that while making life better also have a dramatically positive impact on their organizations.
Minimum Wage: Three things worth noting:
- Most minimum wage jobs in the US can't easily be exported to lower wage places, because they're inherently local in nature.
- The percentage of the final price of a good or service due to minimum wage inputs is pretty low.
- Many businesses sell to consumers, and when they have more money, there's more demand for what they sell.
Given that for even the biggest organizations there are more potential customers than employees, the math of raising the minimum wage works in their favor. More confident and more stable markets mean more sales. Workers struggling to make ends meet are a tax on the economy.
(Consider the brilliant strategic move Henry Ford made in doubling the pay of thousands of his workers in 1914. The assembly line was so efficient that it created profits—but only when it was running, and high turnover made that difficult. By radically raising pay, Ford put pressure on all of his competitors (and on every industry that hired the sort of men he was hiring) at the same time that he created a gateway to the middle class, a middle class that could, of course, buy his cars, whether or not they happened to work for him). Also, consider this point of view…
Climate Change: The shift in our atmosphere causes countless taxes on organizations. Any business that struggled this winter due to storms understands that this a very real cost, a tax that goes nowhere useful and one that creates countless uncertainties. As sea levels rise, entire cities will be threatened, another tax that makes it less likely that people will be able to buy from you.
The climate upredictability tax is large, and it's going to get bigger, in erratic and unpredictable ways.
Decreasing carbon outputs and increasing energy efficiency are long-term investments in global wealth, wealth that translates into more revenue and more profit.
Anti-corruption movements: The only players who benefit from corruption in government are the actors willing to race to the bottom–the most corrupt organizations. Everyone else is forced to play along, but is unlikely to win. As a result, for most of us, efforts to create transparency and fairness in transactions are another step toward efficient and profitable engagements.
Historically, when cultures clean up their acts, get more efficient and take care of their people, businesses thrive. It's not an accident, one causes the other.
In all three cases, there's no political or left/right argument being made–instead, it's the basic economics of a stable business environment with a more secure, higher-income workforce where technological innovation leads to lower energy costs and higher efficiency.
April 4, 2014
