Aluminum hats?
Laurie Kalmanson found this gem. I won’t preface it, but you should check it out.
MIT and the Government Plot.
Understanding the Zero Profit Condition
Austan Goolsbee writes in Slate about something called The Zero Profit Condition.
If you’re in any business where the cost to enter as a competitor is very low, you’ve got this problem. The minute there are big profits being made, competitors will flood in and steal them. This is why there are five times as many real estate brokers in San Francisco as in Steubenville, Ohio. Because the houses cost five times as much, the commissions are five times as great, so brokers show up in enough volume that everyone goes back to making exactly the same amount of money.
The only way to win is to break the rules. To play by your own rules, creating a market in which the cost of entry is very high, or even impossible. If you’re the only one, then you win, by default.
what’s a backup?
Thomas Hawk points us to this new piece of software (actual performance unknown): DVD to iPod.
Question: should you be allowed to backup the DVDs you own? If you leave ten on an airplane or lose them in a fire, do you have to buy replacements? Is it against the law to act out a scene from Star Wars in the privacy of your own home? What about listening to an audio recording you made of the movie? Or watching movies you’ve purchased on your iPod?
You can’t backup your car or your shoes. You can backup your email and even Excel.
I wonder what Proust would say.
remember AOL keywords?
If AOL had won, then keywords would have been even more valuable than domain names.
Andrew Cantino has a different sort of landgrab going on: AllYourWords.com. Fun to think about.
People, not things
It’s hardwired in. We respond (and react) to people. The story is at: Scott Heiferman’s Daily Fotolog.
Bad news for the lazy
The best excuse for not analyzing your website just went away.
Google’s Urchin division is about to offer their services for free: Google Analytics.
As we’ve discussed a million times before, if it’s possible to test and measure successfully in a medium, it’s inevitable that people will test and measure. And when your competition tests and measures, they’re going to evolve faster than you do.
Yikes.
(PS I couldn’t help but notice that Urchin uses Squidoo orange on their site.)
How to Run a Useless Conference
I go to more conferences than you do.
I’m frequently amazed, but not particularly surprised, at what a bad job conferences do at their stated objective. What’s the problem? After all, these are expensive, professionally-run events that work hard to satisfy the typical attendee.
And that, of course, is the problem.
Facts don’t change people’s behavior.
Emotion changes people’s behavior.
Stories and irrational impulses are what change behavior. Not facts or bullet points.
If all we need is facts, then books alone would be sufficient.
When the Surgeon General announced that smoking was fatal, how many smokers quit right away?
Human beings are irrational. Change agents (like you) can fight that and obsess about presenting more and more facts, or we can embrace it and make change happen.
Conferences are designed to get average people to change their behavior. By “average”, I mean typical—the masses, the center of the bell curve. That’s a sensible objective. By definition, most people (in any given population) are in the middle of that bell curve. Change them and you’re golden.
If this group would learn, take action and make things happen with just a memo, you wouldn’t need to have a conference. But we end up being flown on average planes to average hotels to sit in average conference rooms and hear average speakers doing presentations filled with bullet points. And it’s all beyond reproach.
But it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work when you’re on a sales call either. Your facts and your service and your prices can be the best, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the sale. And it breaks down at an annual review and it even happens in a one-on-one encounter with a policeman or a teacher or a clerk.
People are irrational and they usually make decisions that have nothing to do with facts. And yet we spend most of our time improving our facts and very little concerned with the rest.
Think about the most powerful learning moments you’ve ever had. My guess is that they didn’t take place in a darkened meeting room.
Conference organizers (and more important, their clients) spend virtually all of their time and money doing one of two things:
1. Satisfying the center of the bell curve.
2. Avoiding failure
That’s why the typical conference is… typical.
That’s why the food and the setting and the venue and the location and the chairs and the layout and the schedule and the refreshment breaks are… typical.
If you want to run a meeting (a brainstorming meeting, a board meeting, a zoning commission meeting) that is likely to perform as well as your past meetings, then the best thing to do is to run it the way you’ve always been running it, right?
Here’s the challenge, then: figure out how to do the atypical. How to change the interactions that people have with each other. How to change what they talk about in the elevator. How to create an environment where people walk in ready to learn and change and challenge, as opposed to getting that, “hey we’re in the Bahamas let’s get drunk and then sit through a session with the CEO” glazed look.
Sure, it won’t work on everyone. But that’s better than working on no one.
Practice makes perfect?
My third grade teacher, Mr. Guillaume, took issue with that. He insisted that "perfect practice makes perfect."
There are some that will tell you that you can measure a company’s desire to innovate by their R&D spending. This fact from Tom Peters might lay that to rest:
The #1 company in R&D spending over the last 25 years: General Motors.
You don’t get Purple by hiring a bureaucracy and giving them money (or money and time). You do it by having the will to go to the edges. When GM has no cash (and still no will) then they’re really in trouble.
Anonymous generosity
My old friend and colleague Ira Williams has just published his first manifesto. I think it’s pretty good. ChangeThis :: Speak Softly.
How the New Marketing changes Local Max
My earlier post on the Local Max really hit a chord, which I figured it would, because it woke me up in the middle of the night…
The obvious question, after you’ve had the conversation with your team about B, C and the pain of getting to Big Max is this, "How do we get to work to find the really big thing?"
The good news is that the new marketing makes it easier than ever before.
The cost of inventing, prototyping, manufacturing and especially advertising a new thing, concept, service or organization is a tiny fraction of what it used to be. In some industries, you can do it for 1% of what it used to cost.
Sooner or later, your team needs to embrace this fact.
What this means is simple… you can take the cash and the momentum you get from being at Local Max and invest a fraction of it to let a new team, a smaller team, a team without traditional constraints to go ahead and launch something new. Something that disrupts the market, that even competes with the mother ship.
And if it’s your career we’re talking about, the same thing is true. You don’t have to get a formal MBA or quit your job to start a profitable business or sideline. You can leverage the amazing tools that exist without having to wager everything.
There are two mistakes that satisfied Local Max folks make:
1. believing that they can get to the next Max in a linear, pain-free way
and
2. believing that the best way to get there is with brute force. More products more salespeople more ads more buildings more staff…
In fact, the opposite is true.
The more you help your little team, the harder it will be for them to find the new Max.
The bet isn’t the scary one that involves all your money or your full-time job. The bet is the scary one that involves intellectual risks and going way outside your safety zone to see what happens when you disrupt the status quo.