Not just travel agents, but all agents.
Information scarcity is disappearing.
Forty years ago, passengers didn’t know which airline flew where and when. And forty years ago, airlines had no easy way to find out who wanted to fly somewhere. Today, of course, there’s no shortage of information or ability to connect. So paying 10% of their revenue to a human who will use a terminal instead of the passenger using a computer hardly makes sense for the airline.
Movie studios used to have to wrestle with information scarcity, and so did talented creators. Actors weren’t sure who was making what, and studios had imperfect information about who to cast. Today, IMDB (and proprietary tools) surface enormous amounts of information for the studios. They know who is working on what, who is a pain in the neck, who can add to the effectiveness of the project. And the creators are part of networks, formal and informal, that get them information faster and more efficiently than a single human often could.
The same thing is happening to car dealers. In fact, just about any job where you used to hoard information and charge a fee is now in danger.
When your clients know more than you do, it’s difficult to be an old-fashioned agent who is making money based on information scarcity.
The alternative is to become a network hub who creates value through information abundance.
December 23, 2019
Is popular the same as good?
Is popular possible?
Is popular your goal?
There are tens of thousands of humans spending their days trying to be popular on Instagram, buying outfits, wearing hats and seeking their version of cute. People from all backgrounds and genders, hoping to be the next Kardashian.
Facebook is filled with anonymous bots seeking to be popular.
The highest-paid YouTuber this year was an 8-year old kid.
And Twitter is the center of the politi-sphere, with each self-made pundit seeking to outdo the others.
Billions of hours spent by millions, mostly for free, to enrich a few social media platforms.
The lessons of the high school lunch table run deep.
Part of the scam is that the pyramid scheme of attention will somehow pay off for a lot of people. It won’t. It can’t. The math doesn’t hold up. Someone is going to win a lottery, but it probably won’t be us.
And a bigger part is that the things you need to do to be popular (the only metric the platforms share) aren’t the things you’d be doing if you were trying to be effective, or grounded, or proud of the work you’re doing.
When there’s a single metric (likes/followers), we end up looking in the rear-view mirror when we should be driving instead.
Maximizing the benefits for the social media platform you’re on are different than maximizing the benefits for you and those you are leading.
December 22, 2019
“How was your day?”
It’s tempting to answer with just one word.
“Fine.”
The same way we try to lump a job, a project or a person into a single emotion. As if there’s a prize for brevity, and pressure to categorize a lifetime of experiences and expectations into just a few words or a single feeling.
Whatever we’re encountering is a combination of experiences and feelings–from extraordinary to banal to absurd.
The real question is, “which part are you focusing on?”
If you’re focusing on the part of your day that was “fine”, then you’re ignoring the parts that were a miracle, or disappointing, or thrilling.
We get what we pay attention to. Our narration determines what we experience and what we remember.
If your narration isn’t helping you, perhaps it pays to focus on something else.
“Which part of your day are you experiencing right now?”
HT
December 21, 2019
Conventional wisdom:
Find a large group of people.
Explain why you’re better.
Prove that you are the right answer.
Done.
How it actually works:
Earn attention from precisely the right people.
Gain trust.
Tell a story.
Create tension.
Relieve the tension by gaining commitment.
Deliver work that’s remarkable.
They spread the word.
December 20, 2019
Good specs force the difficult conversations to happen before they are expensive.
If you hand a good spec to a builder or a programmer, the chances that you get back the system you’re hoping for are dramatically increased.
For a building, the spec is architectural plans. But give an architect a good spec and she’s much more likely to design a building you’d be happy to live in.
This post is mostly about computers and other complicated systems, but the thinking can be used for just about any project where you and your team are asking a system to solve a problem for you. Unlike buildings, computers and other systems change their state all the time, depending on what just happened and what’s supposed to happen next.
The spec outlines the inputs to the system and the outputs it creates. If it’s simple, it’s easy to write:
Put a quarter into the gumball machine and turn the crank.
A gumball comes out.
So, at the highest level, we have problems and solutions. I need a gumball is the problem, and the solution is to use this machine to turn a quarter into a gumball by releasing one from an inventory.
It gets a bit more complicated when the state of the system might change as the result of previous actions. For example, if the machine is out of gumballs, my spec requires that the quarter be returned. Knowing this, I could also add to the spec that the machine should know how many gumballs are in inventory, and how fast the sales are, so that when it has two or three days of inventory left, it sends a message to headquarters to ask to be refilled.
Inputs and outputs.
It’s worth noting that my spec doesn’t have to include any information about what gumballs are for, or how much it costs us to make gumballs. We’re defining the inputs and outputs of a system.
[It’s totally worth having a different discussion with a different team about your processes, your goals, the people you serve and the problems you seek to solve. Systems work best when they are coherent with what you actually seek to achieve… but we can leave that for another day].
It’s tempting to nail down the precise solutions to each input and output requirement early on. You might decide that the way you’re executing your system should be part of the spec from the beginning. That’s backwards. The system exists for solving problems, and the way the system executes is only there to serve that goal, not the other way around.
Maybe you don’t need a 386 processor or a tin roof to solve your problem. Let’s figure out the problem first, and worry about the way we meet your specs second.
Grab some index cards and simulate your system. Have each user write down precisely what they want to tell/ask the system and have the person running the system hand back index cards with the results that they can expect. Be clear about the state that the system is in before each transaction and after it as well.
The sum total of these interactions is your spec.
Bound this with constraints of time and money and performance and you’ve done the hard part.
HT
December 19, 2019
Many of the ones I know are terrible listeners. They don’t actively engage, don’t see the people who are right in front of them, and don’t exercise much in the way of curiosity or empathy.
I think they got successful because the idea they had inside of them somehow resonated with enough people that they get to share what they were thinking.
But the most reliably successful people I know are precisely the opposite. They are desperate to see and know what’s making other people tick. They actively engage, and they do it with empathy and generosity.
The second path is no guarantee, but it’s more likely to work and it’s also a lot more fun.
December 18, 2019
What if today, just for today, we didn’t settle?
What if we saw precisely the change we sought to make and sacrificed to make that change?
What if we set aside urgencies and focused simply on what’s important instead?
What if we did the work that matters?
December 17, 2019
They’re not very good at hiding.
If you see an elephant in the room, it’s possible that other people do too.
The best way to get it to leave is to simply mention that it’s there.
December 16, 2019
If you want to please someone with a gift, it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed by buying them a pretty good version of the item in question, even if it’s a great value.
Better, the research suggests that you’ll do better to overpay for something in a cheaper category, where it’s obviously the best in the world.
This might seem like a hack of the irrational nature of humanity, but if we consider what it means to have a gift exchange, it makes perfect sense. A gift is not a transfer of monetary value.
Along the same lines, a monetary Christmas bonus, while rational, might not be as appreciated as something of lower value, precisely because thoughtfulness is difficult to put a price tag on.
December 15, 2019
That’s a warning sign.
So is, “I don’t know how it would fail.”
In the first case, you haven’t thought deeply enough (or don’t have enough experience) to imagine how your solution might not work in every case. The best way to make your work better is to get more imaginative about how it could fail to resonate with those you seek to serve.
And in the second, once you can imagine that it might not work, it’s really helpful to imagine what failure actually entails. What breaks? What are the side effects? How will you recover?
The art of solving problems often involves spending time and energy on what you’ll do when you don’t actually solve the problem.
December 14, 2019
