Edgecraft instead of brainstorming
One of the challenges of brainstorming a new idea is that there's too much freedom. With too many possibilities, we can seize up, unable to think of much of anything.
In established organizations, this is particularly difficult, because the first thing the lizard brain says to you is, “don't say that, because if they like it, you're going to be the one who has to build it.”
Instead, consider the notion of edgecraft:
1. Find an edge… a free prize that has been shown to make a product or service remarkable.
2. Go all the way to that edge—as far from the center as the consumers you are trying to reach dare you to go.
You must go all the way to the edge… accepting compromise doesn’t make sense. Running a restaurant where the free prize is your slightly attractive waitstaff won’t work–they’ve got to be supermodels or weightlifters or identical twins. You only create a free prize when you go all the way to the edge and create something remarkable.
The cheapest, easiest, best designed, funniest, most expensive, most productive, most respected, cleanest, loudest…
Before you begin to do edgecraft, you must accept the fact that the edges of the problem aren’t always obvious. Because the edge you’re seeking is not the primary reason for being, you’ve got to see it out of the corner of your eye. It’s not always clear exactly what would make your product or service significantly more remarkable, until you embrace the fact that the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t the problem you think you have. It's also quite possible that your edge will merely be stupid, not effective.
Sometimes you don’t discover the problem you’re solving until after you’ve solved it–it’s not always a top-down process. Someone creates something weird or neat or quirky or fun and the marketplace embraces it. You don’t often create a more popular restaurant by serving better food. You can do it by serving remarkable food, or having a remarkable location or a remarkably famous chef. You don’t often build a better car by building a faster car. You do it by building the most beautiful car, or the least polluting car, or the biggest car. At least for a while.
Instead of slogging your way through incremental improvements in the core element of your offering, then, the edgecrafter seeks out another element and pushes it so far it becomes remarkable.
Cell phone cameras repel UFOs
We've relentlessly outfitted just about everyone with a pocket-sized video camera.
And as we've done that, the UFOs have stopped visiting us.
Experience is real. It is our memory and perception of what happened to us, and it's influenced by our self-told story of the world around us. Experience, though, doesn't spread nearly as well as the digital record does.
That doesn't diminish our need to experience wonder or fear or tribal connection. Digital proof doesn't decrease a human being's need to be an outlier (or an insider) or to flee to safety in the face of things that scare us. It doesn't diminish our need to invent conspiracy theories or recognize heroism.
So the emotional experience moves. It moves from making up sea dragons and UFOs and the other "un-true" things others could never prove were merely made up. Instead, those emotions drive how we interpret what you sell, or what you say when you run for office, or how we interpret what happened on TV screens around the world. It changes the way we think about the things we can look up or get in our email box. Even when we can see something for ourselves, we'd often rather get a talking head or tribal leader to understand it for us. To tell us what people like us think about something like that.
Emotion isn't going to go away when the 'false' legends and fables do. It's too resilient for that. Instead, it's going to influence the story we tell ourselves, as it always has.
We don't need your proof. We need your story, and what it means to us.
Krypton Community College
Logistics (part 1)
Every week for four weeks, a course meets. A course is a group of people learning together, sort of like a book group.
You can host each of the four classes of the course in your office, your home or a coffee shop. The ideal size is 6 to 15 people, but you might want to invite a few extra folks as insurance.
Consider not just your co-workers, but fellow freelancers, friends, people who do work you admire. While it's fine to ask strangers to attend, my sense is that's not going to be effective, at least at first, when the program doesn't have a track record yet.
We call the person who organizes the classes within a course (that's you) an organizer. No credentials required, other than a generous desire to lead and share.
Every four weeks there will be a new course. Obviously, a group can continue meeting from course to course, or you can pick and choose. I think it would extraordinary if the 11,000 people already subscribed to this each hosted ten people for a dozen courses over a year. That would be a powerful step in raising the conversation and output of more than a hundred thousand people…
The first course is going to be based on selections from my work for a few reasons. First, I figure most of you know my work and want to be more engaged with it, and second, I can tweak the course more in search of a paradigm that works. We call the subject of the course a scholar, mostly because we couldn't think of something catchier and more accurate. More scholars will be announced soon.
Before each course is launched, we'll post two different PDF documents here. One is for the students in your class, and the other, similar but with some added material, is for you, the organizer.
This list, then, becomes the central clearinghouse for which courses are up next and sharing what we learn from you. The college, though, is completely distributed, it lives and breathes because of what you do with it.
Your job, then, is to:
- Invite the right people to your course.
- Find someone else to bring snacks.
- Make sure all the students get the PDF, in advance, by email. One PDF covers all four classes in the course.
- Lead the class. This doesn't mean you need to teach it. The best classes are going to be peer-driven events, in which the organizer works to push people forward and to give people a chance to be heard. You're not an expert on anything except your own experience with the work, and that's just fine.
The first course begins in October, and we've reserved Tuesdays as our default day (because syncronizing people across social media can't hurt). #KryptonTuesday is the idea, but you can run it on any day you choose–you're the organizer. Some are choosing to do it during the workday, some in the evening. October 1st is the target launch, and you might consider inviting people to reserve the date.
One and only one boundary: don't run a class online. It won't work and it denatures what we're trying to build. In person is magical.
Students should expect to spend about an hour a week preparing for class (all the material is linked to within the PDF) and perhaps 90 minutes working together in their weekly session with you.
It's all free, it's all open, and I'm hoping that this format will copied and morphed and used by others going forward. We've got nine of the courses outlined, and will release one a month, though it's entirely possible that Krypton (and others) may put a choice of courses online. Of course, once a course is live you can run your classes whenever you like… no need to be in sync if you choose not to.
In my next post, I'll go over some of our thinking about scholars, and then I'll be posting the first curriculum, because you don't need to trust me that's it's worth doing before you invite people to join you.
Actually, they’re not yours
When you say, "my customers," or, "my readers," you're using a shorthand, but you're also making a mistake.
We're not yours.
We're ours.
Your readers aren't going to spread an idea merely because you ask them to.
Your customers aren't going to buy an upgrade just because you issue one.
In the short run, sure, momentum may keep things going. But in the long run (and all the important stuff is in the long run) those individuals, that tribe, is going to care about what they always care about–itself. If you play a part in their version and vision of the future, then sure, go along for that ride. But no, you don't own an audience.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, you rent one.
Krypton Community College
Scarcity and abundance in education
Traditional higher education is based on scarcity.
Famous colleges are permitted to be famous because they don't have many graduates. The value of the degree increases the number of students who want to attend, which further enhances their fame. In fact, they're called, "selective," because they don't let many people in. Here's an amazing truth: many colleges promote their schools to students who can't possibly get in, just so the number of applications will go up, so they can reject more students and thus appear more selective, which will, perversely, make them more popular as a school to apply to.
A class taken at the Harvard continuing education program is not 'worth' nearly as much as one taken by someone who got in to real Harvard. Because getting in is scarce.
Class enrollment is scarce. You need to get up early, or game the system or get lucky to get a seat in the best classes. We happily applaud the value of a small-group seminar and decry the 300 person lecture because the intimacy that comes with this sort of scarcity is valuable.
Accreditation further enhances scarcity, as does the requirement that a certain number of teachers have a doctorate degree.
MOOCs and online education, of course, turn all of this upside down. There's no extra cost to having more students in an online course. 100,000 students isn't at all unusual. Abundance! Not only that, but since anyone can take any course, there's an abundance of choice. A typical university might offer just one or two intro courses in artificial intelligence, but the internet can easily offer a hundred or a thousand.
Abundance means that there's far less brand value in saying you took a course, because the fact that you took the course isn't rare or scarce. The learning is valuable, not the proof you took it.
Now that just about anyone can continue their education, just about everyone must. You must, because if you're not keeping up, you're falling behind. You must because the new abundance creates a new expectation. "What do you mean you don't understand that…"
Here's the big leap: When we were offering you the valuable prize of a brand-name degree, that scarcity required you to jump through hoops to get it. It meant you had to spend years in high school following the pre-college rules just to get in. It meant that we had to test you in each course, to prove you learned it. The proof was what you exchanged for your A, and your A was the coin you needed to buy your summa cum laude degree, the thing of value.
In the world of abundance, there's no scarce degree. So testing you as a form of scarce proof is silly. No, the reward is simpler–learn something because you want to learn it, not because you need a grade on a curve.
Forgive me for going on, but I wanted to expose this line of thinking to help you see how flipped and flopped our experience of education is about to become.
The old system isn't going away. I still want my surgeon and my engineer to be certified and to prove that they've learned what they were supposed to learn. But more and more of the education we're valuing today is about the soft skills of decision making and creativity and most of all, about the choice to grow and step up. And that sort of learning doesn't easily happen in a scarcity-based institution.
Learn what you want to learn.
Pick yourself.
Do it often.
Don't do it for proof, do it because the learning itself is worth it.
Organize and teach and lead, because it's a great way to learn, because it's the right thing to do and because it is a new sort of scarcity, the scarcity of people who care.
[coming later this week: details on our first course and how you can start organizing for it].
Q&A: All Marketers… and the challenge of telling the right story
Our series continues with All Marketers are Liars, a prime example of what happens when you tell a story wrong. I've done some pretty poor book titling over seventeen books, but this one was too clever by half.
Most people, of course, have never read any of my books, and even most of my blog readers haven't read any given Seth Godin book. So a book is judged by its cover, just as you and your brand and your product are judged by your (conceptual) cover.
People saw this cover (with the original ridiculous photo) and immediately assumed that they knew what it was about (how to lie) and that the title offended them ("hey, I'm a marketer and I'm not a liar").
But, of course, the book isn't about how to lie, it's about the imperative to tell the truth, a truth that resonates, a truth you can live with. The title messes with our perceptions, but in a way that instead of welcoming in my very busy, very picky potential reader, pushes her away. One newspaper reviewer slammed the book without even reading it, deciding that the title alone was sufficient cause for dismissing it.
So, to answer David Meerman Scott's (and others') questions: I changed the title for future editions to All Marketers Tell Stories because, even though it's less artistic, it takes my own advice (at least a little). An even better title would have been: TRUE STORIES (and the Smart Marketers That Tell Them).
The advice: find the worldview and the bias and the cultural preconceptions that your audience carries with them and then place your story (you do have a story, whether you want to or not) as a hook that leverages those biases.
In the internet era, your story is going to be inspected, held up to scrutiny and scoured for half-truths. But if your story is true, if it not only resonates with the worldview we insist on but actually delivers, then you've created something of lasting value.
The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.
Krulak’s law is simple: Soldiers in the field interacting with local people are the most important element of nation building and counter insurgency. It has wide applicability to any organization that interacts with the public.
One errant minimum-wage cog in the machine can cripple an entire brand,
or at the very least, wreck the lifetime value of a customer. The two kids at
Domino’s who made a YouTube sensation out of cruelty to pizza did more damage
to the Domino’s brand than any vice president ever could.
The instinct, then, is to tightly control that last step, to be sure no one has any leeway or can take initiative when dealing with customers, because, after all, you can't trust them.
This is a self-defeating precaution. As soon as you elminate humanity from the interactions you have with customers, you've guaranteed that your (now sterile) brand will mean less than it could.
Hire better people. Trust them more. And be prepared to make it right when they don't.
Being found vs. being sought
There are proven strategies that generic products can use so that they're more likely to be stumbled upon by someone searching. Name your new book with all sorts of keywords in the title, for example, so it organically ranks higher for those very keywords…
The alternative is to create a product that earns a reputation sufficient that people choose to talk about it, choose to argue about it, choose to look for it. Not something like it, but it.
Nice to be found. Essential to be sought.
This was always a good idea, but in a post-search era of mobile and social, it's now the best idea.
Krypton Community College
In search of a narwhal
Krypton is an experiment in one way we can think about a future of education.
One of the best things about playing with ways to engage in education is that there are all these fabulous tropes. Calling this a "community college" for example, is a way of getting at the idea of community and collegiality and inquiry, while still riffing on the name of an institution.
You can have deans, registrars, degrees, grades, ivy covered buildings, cheerleaders–tons of shortcuts to communicate a reminder of something that most of us have experienced in one way or another.
Of course, every institution worth its salt today also has a sports program, with a private jet, a football team and a mascot. We don't need the jet or the footballs, but we do have a mascot.
Here's what the interns looked like sorting through their limited-edition Krypton Ultimate Frisbee Team t-shirts ("league champs, 2016"). There are no more of these, but one day perhaps we'll make something even cooler.
Before we do that, though, we need an image of our mascot, so we can invent our own t-shirts and swag.
If any of you are up for the task, draw your narwhal, a better narwhal, polish it up and send it over. The winning mammal gets a free t-shirt. Thanks.
We'll get back to more serious matters in two days. Enjoy your weekend!
PS This stamp, while well intentioned, is insufficient. It misses the joy of being a tusked sea mammal, don't you think?
