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.
August 7, 2024
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.
August 6, 2024
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.
August 5, 2024
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.
August 4, 2024
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.
August 3, 2024
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?
August 2, 2024
It feels urgent because it is.
But by the time the train is running away, it might be too late.
The better strategy is to not sign up for trains that are likely to run away.
The first principle of risk reduction is to figure out if you can stop it later. If you can’t, don’t start.
August 1, 2024
Make a list of things you used to believe. Fervently, certainly, completely.
Things that you were sure of, but now, with the passage of time and the benefit of experience, you know to be incorrect or incomplete.
Of course, it’s not just mythical creatures beloved by children. It’s our adherence to a social norm, loyalty to a leader or the structure of a point of view.
We’re pretty good at allowing our incorrect certainties to slowly fade into the background, without a crisis or reckoning. We gradually move on, now even more certain about the other things we’re certain of.
Resilience can be found by holding onto our certainties just a little less tightly. One way to do that is to remember just how often the old ones fade away.
July 31, 2024
Important hills usually get much steeper at the top.
99% of the training in competitive athletics is devoted to the last 1% of performance. A tenth of a second.
The same is true for squeezing the last bit of performance out of a car, a grape or a semiconductor. And healthcare, luxury goods and science as well.
As soon as we declare it important and invite the world to compete, the problems become more difficult.
Our experience tells us that more input leads to more output, but in asymptotic conditions, where competition is seeking to go to the very end of the curve, this rule is often suspended. The entire point of the competition is how extreme the last few steps are.
The options are pretty clear:
- focus on activities where you’re in the sweet spot of the curve, where more preparation, focus and effort lead to huge benefits. This means walking away from competitions against people who are committed to being unreasonable.
- embrace the unreasonable and accept that your competitors will as well.
While the unreasonable is thrilling, it’s difficult to build a sustainable career around it.
July 30, 2024
A philosopher can spend a month, a year or a career thinking about one knotty problem.
Making assertions, testing theories, understanding how others are thinking about it as well.
But this exercise shouldn’t be reserved for academics.
What are you working on? When will you change your mind? What can you learn, what can you challenge?
It’s better when we’re on the cusp.
July 29, 2024
