Fire inspectors
Running into a burning building is heroic work.
Keeping buildings from burning down in the first place is actually just as important. And it scales more reliably.
Living in the future
In a bad 1950s science fiction movie, you might see flying jetpacks, invisibility cloaks and ray guns.
What we got instead is a device that fits in our pocket. It allows us to connect to more than a billion people. It knows where we are and where we’re going. It has all of our contacts, the sum total of all published knowledge, an artificially intelligent computer that can understand and speak in our language, one of the best cameras ever developed, a video camera with editor, a universal translator and a system that can measure our heart rate. We can look up real time pricing and inventory data, listen to trained actors read us audiobooks and identify any song, any plant or any bird. We can see the reviews from our community of nearby restaurants or even the reputation of a doctor or lawyer. It can track the location of our loved ones and call us a chauffeured vehicle at the touch of a button.
And of course, we use it to have arguments. And to watch very short stupid videos.
Adjacent but not relevant
There’s a sale on band saw blades, including a really good deal on one that fits the saw you owned years ago.
The folks who live next door to the house you used to live in are having a raucous party.
A guy with a name just like yours wins the lottery…
These adjacencies can capture our attention, but they’re simply a distraction. We are easily triggered by things that feel close, but come out ahead when we focus on the things that are actually relevant.
Silence vs noise
When a group comes together, noise is easy. Just a few people have to make a commotion for noise to happen.
But silence requires everyone to be in sync.
Misunderstanding bigness
IBM spent a fortune fighting calls for them to be broken up. So did AT&T and Microsoft.
In all three cases, there’s plenty of evidence that they would have been better off if they had simply broken themselves up. Microsoft is still recovering and IBM never will.
One computer company, one phone company, one software company, one search engine… It doesn’t last.
If these companies had intentionally divided up, customers would benefit, so would shareholders and most of the leadership of each organization. Perhaps a few dozen people had a lot at stake in maintaining a mythical sort of scale, and they wasted time and money trying to maintain it.
The company is more than just the few people who run it. And the benefits the organization creates extend beyond the people in the C suite.
In the short run, enforced dominance can offer rewards, both financial and related to ego, mostly to senior management.
But the short run is fairly short, and the resilience, productivity and utility that come from agility and serving customers and employees more effectively is worth the transition.
The very thing that enabled these companies to succeed disappears once they seek to obtain bigness at any cost. MBAs take over, and the focus that led to success disappears.
Buying a big publishing company like Simon and Schuster wasn’t the smart way for a giant publishing company like Penguin to succeed. They’d be better off dividing into agile silos that can focus on the work that needs to be done.
Google’s a monopoly, and has been for years. As a result, they’ve made decisions that weren’t informed by what was best for their users or team members, and they’ve missed countless opportunities to create value, simply because they were prioritizing something else.
The same is true for the local business that has enough scale to act like a bully. A restaurant or real estate broker or distributor that tries to corner the market ends up spending time cornering, not serving, the market.
Adversarial interoperability creates productivity and value. And having a smaller part of a more vibrant market is far better than dominating a moribund one.
The challenge of “a risky scheme”
New ideas aren’t adopted all at once. A few people go first while the rest of us watch to see how it goes. “Look, Mikey, he likes it!” This is the story of tech innovations, dance crazes and even food.
Ideas spread horizontally, and people who prefer the status quo will embrace an idea only when they feel as though they don’t have much of a choice. It took the telephone more than forty years to reach a million people. Today, this spread is much faster, but it’s never instantaneous.
It’s gradual, organic, and based on the decisions of individuals, rolling up into a larger change.
Ideas that require simultaneous adoption by large populations are a notable exception to the horizontal rule. Nuclear power plants, for example, aren’t the sort of thing you try in your backyard and then spread the word to the others. The same goes for laws and policies, as well as institutional shifts that come from a committee with authority.
Often, people who are innovators spend time and energy to highlight the productivity, equity or magic of their new approach. In a point by point presentation, these arguments may often carry the day. This is the occasional thoughtful work of a committee that’s actually focused on making a change happen.
But two words can cause the demand for wholesale shifts to stumble. Not all innovations are positive, generative or wise. They need pushback.
When someone who worries about a change identifies a “risky scheme,” red flags start flying.
“Risky” means it might not work. Change is always risky, because innovation doesn’t come with a guarantee. An organization or culture that fears the risk may decide to wait a few cycles, to see what happens if they don’t switch. “We can always do it later.”
And “scheme” implies that someone pushing this change has a different agenda than we do. The instigator of the change obviously sees a benefit in selling us the new idea, or else they wouldn’t put in the effort. When we don’t trust the originator of the idea, when we see that they may profit more than we do, it shifts from being an innovation to becoming a scheme. No one likes to get hustled, no one wants to be tricked.
The huckster or con artist fears being called out for the risky scheme.
The opportunity is to get better at identifying the risky schemes, particularly when they seem easy, convenient or short-term greedy. We can name them and push back on the pressure to go along because being manipulated is not in our interests.
Learning in August
What better time? An hour a day for a month and you can learn a skill you’ll have forever. Beach reads are a fine way to chill out, but a month spent to learn a skill is a fine way to take advantage of a quiet time.
My brand new course on Strategy is now live. It’s 30% off this week if you use this link. I’ve workshopped it with 300 people around the world, and we’re finding it powerful and effective. More than forty video lessons, it’s the basis for my new book, out in October.
And I’m also bringing back a discount on my most popular course, the Marketing Seminar with 9,000 students on Udemy. Only in August.
Also, here’s a shorter course on value creation and the process of figuring out which projects are worth doing. You can see the eight most popular courses here.
Learning creates possibility. Once we learn to see how the world works, we can show up to make things better.
Reclaiming “fiasco”
Usually modified with “total,” the failure might not be as bad as we fear.
The origin of the word probably comes from Italian, a long time ago. The person who loses a round in a game has to buy the next bottle for the group (from: flask).
Which means that there is going to be another game.
Another performance.
Another chance to make things better.
If we’re so concerned about fiascos that we never play, we’ll never make anything better.
The Mississippi River paradox
There’s no water in that river that was there ten years ago.
The boundaries have shifted in that time as well, there’s no riverbank that’s exactly where it was. And the silt and the fish have all moved too.
So, what’s “the Mississippi River”?
It’s a label, a placeholder, and a marker–when the Mississippi does something we don’t expect it to do, we comment on it.
People are like this as well. What if you could only be known for the best (or the worst) thing you ever did? You’re not that person now, and it’s likely you’ll never be that person again. But that’s the label we gave you.
When we talk about the organization or the brand or that neighbor down the street, we act as these are immutable objects, basic unchanging elements or static facts.
But like rivers, people change.
When the label stops being useful, we should change it. The problem with holding a grudge is that it makes your hands too full to do anything useful.
Infamy
We’ve gotten so hung up on famous that it’s easy to forget that there are two kinds of renown.
Being known for lowering the standards of discourse, cheating, or whining is a choice, but why would you trade your reputation to become infamous?