Short-term thinking repeated again and again doesn’t lead to long-term thinking.
Rand Fishkin shares a thoughtful analysis about a trend that now affects just about everyone: Google is hoarding more and more traffic.
When I worked at Yahoo, there were 183 links on our home page. The stated strategy of the company was to build more and more internal content and services (Yahoo mail, Yahooligans, Yahoo Finance) to keep as many surfers on their site for as long as they could. The math was simple: if you’re getting paid by the impression, having someone stay for twenty or thirty clicks is way more profitable than encouraging them to leave and go to another site.
Google blew this status quo wide open. Their model was very different: “come here on your way to somewhere else.” There were only two links on their home page, because the only place they wanted to encourage you to go was wherever a good search led you.
If you were a company or an individual with something to say, this hub and spoke model was essential to your ability to make a difference online. The web is a very big haystack, but if your needle was sharp enough, the promise was that you could get found.
And if you were someone looking for information, commerce or connection, you could rely on Google to take you there.
This, as much as anything, enabled Google to draw huge amounts of traffic away from Yahoo. It didn’t take very long for surfers to realize that they wanted to see what else was out there, not be shunted around a walled garden.
Year after year, driven by the short-term (shortsighted) demands of the public markets, Google has been losing its way on this effective (and community-based) strategy. In the most recent data Rand quoted, we see that more than half the time, a search on Google leads to someone either clicking on nothing (because they found what they needed without leaving the search results) or visiting a property Google already owns.
On a regular basis, Google makes changes to their UI and algorithm that destroy companies or industries in order to keep more time and clicks from the person who was expecting to find themselves somewhere else after visiting Google.
If you’re a fan of the open web, this is bad news.
If you’re an individual or business that’s hoping to be ‘found’ via a search, this is bad news.
And if you’re a Google employee or shareholder this is bad news as well, because monopoly is a tempting place to extract cash and drive the stock up, but it’s not stable.
The resilience of the connected open web is one of the shining lights of our modern culture, and my hope is that we can avert lock-in before we calcify around the current status quo.
Every monopoly seems like it’s going to last forever, until it doesn’t.
August 22, 2019
You might know one.
The busy person has a bias for action, the ability to ship, and a willingness to contribute more than is required. The busy person is wrong more than most people (if you get up to bat more often, you’re going to have more hits and more strike outs, right?). Those errors are dwarfed by the impact they create.
Being a busy person is a choice.
It might not work for you, but you could try it out for a while.
We need more busy people.
August 21, 2019
If you’re creating something where widespread inputs, usage and adoption lead to significant benefits, it’s worth considering who you’re excluding.
The curb cut turned out not simply to be a boon for wheelchair users. At low cost, it opened the sidewalk to a significantly larger audience of strollers, delivery people and skateboarders, too.
Often, we make the mistake of focusing on too broad an audience. Obsessing about the minimum viable audience forces us to make something that’s truly better. But once we identify those we seek to serve, broadening access is a powerful way to add impact.
This isn’t a matter of high or low, more or less. It’s the power of thinking hard about who it’s for and what it’s for.
August 20, 2019
For more than a decade, I’ve been working with the fine folks at 800 CEO READ (and yes, that’s their phone number, and yes, people have asked me how to reach them.)
It’s where I exclusively sell my book What To Do When It’s Your Turn.
It’s the place my project ChangeThis is still happily thriving.
And it’s the place that makes it easy to buy a big box of books for an event or organization. If you need more than three copies of a title, give them a call and ask. You already know the number.
I’ve never said ‘thank you’ to them here on the blog, so today’s a fine day to do that. They’re changing their name and their website today: PorchlightBooks.
Thanks to the entire team for making the world of books a whole lot easier and more friendly.
August 19, 2019
If you’re trying to help yourself (or those you serve), the most effective thing you can do is create long-term habits. They become unseen foundations of who we will become.
The goal of running a marathon in six weeks is audacious, but it’s not a habit. You might succeed, but with all that pressure, it’s more likely you’ll simply abandon the project.
On the other hand, the goal of running to the mailbox (at least) and back for 50 days in a row is the sort of habit that might stick.
The same goes for education (“we do flashcards every day” is very different from “I need to cram to learn quantum mechanics for the test.”)
And it goes double for our lifestyles. If you can replace a bad habit with a good one, you’ll live with the benefits for decades.
The challenge is to set up systems that are likely to create habits, not sprints that lead to failure.
Pema Chodron’s story has stuck with me for a decade: At a meditation retreat, the guy sitting near her kept making an annoying clicking sound. Again and again, she was jolted from her practice because he kept clicking his tongue.
During the break, as she gathered up her courage to tell him that he was ruining the day for her and for everyone else, she realized that in fact, it was a nearby radiator that was causing the clicking.
Suddenly, the fact that it was an inanimate object changed everything for her.
It wasn’t about her any longer.
It wasn’t intentional or selfish.
It was simply a radiator.
The rest of the day was fine, because it was simply a radiator.
My biggest takeaway is that the key leap wasn’t in discovering that the sounds came from a radiator. The lesson is that acting like it comes from a radiator completely solves the problem.
Sometimes (often, usually), it’s not about us. It’s simply weather.
August 18, 2019
The us/them mindset of most corporate customer service is simple:
- When you can, get it over with.
- If at all possible, evade responsibility.
Which means that when things go wrong, you’ll likely encounter a legalistic mentality that begins and ends with, “it’s out of our control.”
There’s an alternative.
It begins with understanding the economics of loyalty. Saving a customer is ten times more efficient than finding a new one. If it costs an airline $1,000 of marketing and route development to acquire a first class business traveler, it’s worth at least $10,000 in customer service to keep one. And that means that an extra ten minutes on the phone clocks in at a high value indeed.
And it continues with a simple tactic: Instead of defining the minimal legal requirement, outline the maximum possible action you could have taken.
“You’re right ma’am, that was a terrible situation. And we could have alerted you in advance that the plane was late, and we could have trained the flight attendants to be more aware of situations like this and we could have been significantly more responsive when we saw that the whole thing was going sideways. That’s incredibly frustrating–you’re right.”
Because it’s all true. You could have done all of these things. And it’s true, it was frustrating. If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t have called.
And then, after learning all the things you could have done, send the ideas upstream. It’s free advice, but it’s good advice.
Because the race doesn’t go to organizations that do the minimal legal requirement. The race goes to those that figure out what they could do. And do it.
August 17, 2019
Leaders create the conditions where people choose new actions.
The choices are voluntary. They’re made by people who see a new landscape, new opportunities and new options.
You can’t make people change. But you can create an environment where they choose to.
August 16, 2019
Find the right clients
Earn their attention and trust
Identify the problem
Find their fear, embrace their objectives
Prototype possible solutions
Create an architecture that supports your solution to the problem
Build a minimum viable solution
Test it
Program a well-documented, resilient piece of code
Test it
Debug it
Ship it
It’s easy to get distracted by the part of the stack that we consider to be our job or simply our expertise. But it’s all connected.
August 15, 2019
It used to be that a well-tended lawn of 50 by 100 feet was wasteful indeed. Today, it’s in the by-laws of the local housing association. You could impress the neighbors with a new Cadillac, now you not only need a Tesla, but you need a new Tesla. And you could show off by flying first class, but then you needed to charter a plane, then charter a jet, then charter a bigger jet, then buy a fractional share, then own the whole thing, then get a bigger one and on and on.
Conspicuous consumption is not absolute, it’s relative.
It’s sort of a selfish potlatch, in which each person seeks to demonstrate status, at whatever the personal or societal cost, by out-consuming the others.
Social networks have amplified this desire, at the same time they simplified the execution. Now you can waste time and dignity instead of money. Who can you tear down? How much time can you waste? What’s it worth to you to have more followers than the others?
It’s a lousy game, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you also lose.
The only way to do well is to refuse to play.
Earning trust outperforms earning envy.
August 14, 2019
