Every public company seeks, at some level, to be a monopoly, an organization with enough market power to dictate pricing, profits and the future of the market.
And monopoly is also a critical failure of capitalism. When monopoly occurs, when the customer no longer has a choice, prices go up, innovation goes down and mostly, consumers have no voice.
A key role of government is to create an environment where monopolies don't happen–and when they do, to intervene and eliminate them.
Choice is the key word in making markets work. No choice, no market.
May 11, 2018
Walk through the diamond district in Manhattan and in the course of one block, at least a dozen men will stop you and ask if you're hoping to sell a diamond ring.
A few blocks away, Tiffany will happily sell you a diamond ring.
Buy a $7,000 ring at Tiffany's and walk over to one of these guys and you'll be lucky to get $1,000 for your new ring.
That $6,000 is what you paid for the story.
It's the cost of the box, the lighting, the salespeople, the architecture and most of all, the special feeling.
Do a blind taste test. In one glass, wine from a $10 bottle. In the other, wine from a $200 bottle. The untasted difference between the two is what you paid for the story.
The list goes on and on.
Just about everything we buy comes with a story included.
And yet, most creators, sellers and marketers don't invest enough, don't take enough care, and don't persist enough in making sure the story is worth what you paid for it.
May 10, 2018
Is it ever okay to sell the rights to your work?
Milton Glaser was paid about $2,000 in expenses to create the I Love NY logo, one of the iconic marketing images of its decade. He later said, "I was very happy to do it. I was very happy about the consequences.”
Carolyn Davidson originally made $35 for designing the swoosh that Nike made famous.
Neither was paid enough, certainly.
It's tempting to reject the idea of a creative buyout on principle. After all, you're getting paid a relatively small amount for work that could end up in front of a billion people.
But there's a difference between art and illustration. Between commotion and expression.
Illustration has a client. The client may have an idea or a specific need. And the client is taking on all of the risk, doing all of the promotion. Of course, if it doesn't become a home run, the client isn't entitled to a refund.
The artist, on the other hand, works for the muse. She's responsible for the execution, sure, but also the content, the market fit and the magic of what happens next. The artist is free to wander, and free to own the consequences.
Illustration is a bit like copywriting, corporate music, industrial photography–anything where you're doing your work for commerce, for a client, under direction.
As Milton Glaser has shown, being associated with dramatic success as an illustrator opens the door to even more success. It can fuel your art and create opportunities for higher leverage in your illustration work as well. Illustration can pay some bills at the same time it chips away at your obscurity problem.
When you're willing to do art, do art. Do it wholeheartedly. But the world needs illustrators too, and if it's a useful tool for you, embrace it.
May 9, 2018
The mass producers of the world (from ketchup to school) tried to persuade us that by grouping everyone into a tight bundle of normal, everything would become more efficient and we'd all do better. In stats, this is called leptokurtosis.
The race for leptokurtosis spread like wildfire. It implies control and reliability and compatibility. It insists that people who don't eat normal food are a pain in the neck, that folks who are differently abled and need an accommodation are somehow costing the rest of us something.
You can have any color car you want as long as it's black, and if you can't reach the pedals or read the fine print, well, maybe you shouldn't be driving.
What we've discovered, though, is that a platykurtic distribution is actually more efficient, more powerful and more fair.
Platykurtic? Yes, with wide, long tails. Like a platypus. Everyone welcome. Designed for humans, not a machine.
When we build an adjustable seat, when we make things that work for more and more people, we don't spend more. We get more.
May 8, 2018
Creative institutions get bigger so that they can avoid doing things that feel risky.
They may rationalize this as leverage, as creating more impact. But it's a coin with two sides, and the other side is that they do proportionally more things that are reliable and fewer things that feel like they might fail.
In other words, hiring more people makes their useful creative productivity go down.
This is not the way it works in a factory. When Henry Ford hired more people for the assembly line, productivity went up. Things got more efficient. More lines, more plants, more hands led to more productivity. The natural scale of the enterprise was large indeed.
But a creative studio, a marketing team, architects, strategists, programmers, writers, editors, city planners, teachers–the natural scale of the enterprise is smaller than you think.
This is a new law of organizations, and it's not well understood.
We hire more people to make it feel safer. To paper over the cracks, to please more people, to increase stability.
None of these things are why the creative institution exists.
While the bureaucracy may benefit from more scale, the work doesn't.
May 7, 2018
If you want us to take your new proposal seriously, consider including a pre mortem.
Include a detailed analysis of why your project might fail.
Specific weak spots, individuals who need to come on board, assumptions that might not be true…
If you've got a track record of successfully predicting specific points of failure before they happen, we're a lot more likely to trust your judgment next time.
May 6, 2018
The last thing to add to an important email is the email address.
Write the thing, save it as a draft, and, an hour later, put the email address in and then hit send.
It's not clear that you should send an important text, but if you're going to, write it in a notes app, then copy, paste and send.
Send it when you're ready, not before.
There's no 'recall' button.
May 5, 2018
Any organization of more than two people has a structure, intentional or not.
It might be a hub and spoke,
a ladder,
a pyramid,
a lattice,
a hive,
a circle…
Each has an advantage. But the structure of your organization, your systems, your communication–when you work against it, nothing much happens.
May 4, 2018
Successful media (let's define 'successful' as media that can make a difference, make a connection and possibly make a living) has four elements:
Attention
Enrollment
Trust and
Permission
Too often, particularly online, people just worry about the first one.
It's a race to go viral, to go low, to make a bunch of noise. The quick hit, the shortcut, the inflammation.
But attention is insufficient.
Enrollment means that your audience wants to go where you're going.
Trust earns you the benefit of the doubt.
And permission means you don't have to begin from scratch every time. You've earned some attention. The privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages over time.
May 3, 2018
Without a doubt, your little idea is going to grow. We're rooting for your acorn to turn into an oak tree.
But bringing that acorn to the lumberyard, hoping to make a sale… you're wasting your time and their time too.
Most people are waiting for a proven, tested and popular solution.
Some people want to invest in acorns (but they don't go to lumberyards looking for them).
May 2, 2018
