There are still pockets of our culture where a single individual can create and share a body of work that’s resonant and unique.
I’ve become hooked on a podcast called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.
I’m now a backer on Patreon. The show is at https://500songs.com/ [My suggestion is that you start with a song you know and love instead of beginning at the beginning.]
It’s simply extraordinary. Trivia connected to cultural commentary connected to the endless web of the pop music world. Hundreds of hours of insight and connection, all written, narrated and produced by a single person.
There’s a lot to be said about the power of teams to create art and magic. But there’s still room for individuals to do this as well.
[While we’re talking music, happy to suggest a piece of software that might change how you find and play it. Built by a team, not an individual, Roon is a game-changer.]
The non-networked world was driven by push. The merchant stocked goods and waited for you to come buy them. The manufacturer made things in advance and advertised so you’d go buy them. The cab waited by the corner hoping you’d come out and hail it. The door-to-door salesperson went door to door…
But the web amplifies pull instead. When you need something, you tell Google or Amazon or Lyft or Shopify and they bring it to you. The ratio of inventory to demand has shifted dramatically–instead of one encyclopedia in every single house that sits idly waiting for you to need it, there’s just one Wikipedia, available to be pulled by anyone, at will.
When we seek to make change, our instinct is to start pushing. But shifting to pull can create efficiencies that can’t be matched by mass promotion.
It’s one of the best metaphors for life, marketing, achievement, community and possibility in all of TV cartooning.
The coyote is always looking for a quick win. Because he doesn’t persist with a plan that builds over time, all of his outlandish stunts add up to nothing but frustration.
The coyote is obsessed with gaining at the expense of his enemy. As a result, he’s faced with either defeat or short-lived and ultimately empty victory.
The coyote is obviously immortal, but he’s always in pain. Either in the pain that comes from hitting a wall at 100 miles an hour, or the pain of knowing that yet another short-term plan came to no good.
The coyote challenges the laws of physics in the belief that he, and he alone is entitled to his own rules.
The coyote is happy to spend money on ludicrous devices that make promises he must know are empty, but instead of investing, he keeps chasing the gimmicks.
The coyote picked the wrong goal. Even though it’s clear he can’t succeed, he doesn’t switch, obsessing about sunk costs instead.
And even though he has experienced the frustration of the short-term selfish shortcut again and again, he never pauses to consider what would happen if he created something of value instead.
People often use the words to mean the same thing, but they’re different.
If an exterminator puts signs and banners in front of a fancy house when they’re inside killing rats, that’s promotion. But it’s not good marketing.
Marketing is creating the conditions for a story to spread so you can help people get to where they hope to go. Marketing is work that matters for people who care, a chance to create products and services that lead to change.
Promotion can support that. Or it might simply be a selfish hustle for attention.
If you have to interrupt, trick or coerce people to get the word out, you might be doing too much promotion and not enough marketing.
If you compare a Starbucks of ten years ago to a current one, they’re virtually the same. Compare this to the originals in Seattle, and the difference is startling.
The same goes for the design of a typical McDonald’s.
Apple launched the Mac with about a dozen full-time people working on its development. Today, they have more than a thousand times as many engineers and they haven’t launched a groundbreaking product in a while.
The same goes for Google. And Slack.
It’s not just famous big brands. Just about every organization hits a point where the pace of innovation slows as scale increases.
This happens for a number of reasons, and there are two ways to deal with them.
Technical debt is the result of shortcuts taken to get things to work right now. As a result of these shortcuts, the software (or hardware) isn’t easily expandable for future needs.
Handshake overhead is the result of the simple law of more people. n*(n – 1)/2. Two people need one handshake to be introduced. On the other hand, 9 people need 36 handshakes. More people involve more meetings, more approvals, more coordination.
Customer commitments are an asset but also a brake on innovation. The customers you already have didn’t necessarily sign up for you to change things.
Partner preferences are similar to customer commitments. The partners you work with have their own objectives and pace, the easiest common denominator is ‘slower.’
Wall Street’s fear is common, but fading a bit. This is the instinct that many institutional investors have to avoid the unknown. “The stock is going up, don’t blow it.”
Managerial anxiety is what happens when an operating bureaucracy comes to replace daring leadership. People get promoted because they’re good at their jobs, and innovation isn’t an opportunity, it’s a threat.
So, what to do? Ignoring everything above isn’t going to work. Tasking your people to burn all candles at both ends and to change their approach, while also violating the laws of institutional physics is simply not going to work. You’ll hit the wall. Every time.
There are two useful options:
Boring as a strategy is the approach that Apple and a large number of famous brands have taken. As you cross the chasm, the bulk of your new customers don’t want innovation at all. They want promises kept, a lack of surprises and reasonable prices and efficiency. Shipping your improvements on a regular schedule and bringing predictability to your offering allows you to reach more people and make a bigger impact. Small innovations allow an organization to avoid falling too far behind innovative competitors, and it can take decades before the gap is big enough to matter. And then you become Yahoo. Or Chrysler. Or Carvel.
Structural bankruptcy is a daring alternative. Create a skunkworks. Refactor your code from scratch. Spin off the cash cow and assemble a team to start something new from scratch. The new things probably won’t work at first, but if you do enough of them, your experience and persistence will pay off.
I’ve faced these choices many times in my career, and neither choice is easy or obvious, but the choice itself shouldn’t be ignored. If you simply hope for the best of both worlds, you’re likely to be frustrated at the same time you disappoint the people you work with and serve.
For six years, if you wanted an electric car, you’d need to pay extra. It cost more than the regular kind.
Of course, if you decided to buy one, you weren’t paying extra. You were buying sustainability, community awareness, cachet, status, safety, quiet and the feeling of being an early adopter.
People never pay extra.
They buy something they want at a price that feels fair to them.
In the next few years, electric cars are actually going to be cheaper than their more-polluting brethren. And that means that anyone who wants to charge a premium is going to have to offer quality, service, design and a feeling that it’s worth whatever is being charged.
It’s very difficult to make a living selling something that doesn’t, by some apparent measure, cost extra.
The hard work is in keeping the promise that your extra isn’t extra at all.
Industries are often held together by unspoken hierarchies, signposts on the road to achievement.
In the fancy parts of the book business, it’s not profit. Editors are often unaware of which books are truly profitable. They keep track of cultural impact, literary respect, the idea of a book being ‘well published’ and the hard-to-measure currency of ‘important’.
The Kindle and the long tail changed that, with new entrants keeping track of something else.
The “A” list movies, on the other hand, have an entire circle of status that’s organized around Academy Awards, famous directors and a pecking order that would be invisible to many of us.
Netflix and Youtube changed that as well, with new entrants keeping track of shorter cycles and different metrics.
In Silicon Valley, which has been an engine of our future for thirty years, technical prowess and elegance were the key drivers.
Now, the focus has shifted to simplicity, memes and momentary cultural currency in search of big numbers. The new signposts are about cultural ubiquity, IPOs, quick flips and harvesting data.
Apps instead of programs, user interfaces that need no instructions and don’t really reward a lot of effort, and output that’s driven by both. Like a roach motel, the goal is to make it seductive and hard to escape.
The hierarchies of status drive decisions far more than we realize. We often architect the systems that create our culture without paying attention to why.
Skepticism is a virtue. It requires a willingness to question conventional wisdom, and the guts to accept something after you discover that it’s actually true.
Denialism, on the other hand, is a willful rejection of reality. It’s safe and easy, and unproductive. Because there’s no room to change your mind.
To be a generous skeptic, we need to state in advance specifically what it would take for us to engage with the proposed insight, and then do so after our standards are met.
This is hard work. It’s not easy to change one’s mind. Difficult but worth it. Big shifts in perception are rare and it’s not something we look forward to.
Skeptics are a key to the scientific method, organizational design and even investing. We sign up to doubt and question and push, and then we become productive contributors by embracing the new tools and results.
Often, people in denial pretend to be skeptics. It feels more powerful than acknowledging that we’re simply avoiding change.
Of course you’re interesting. There’s something about what you’ve done, what you say, how you show up in the world that’s worthy of interest.
But that doesn’t mean that people are interested.
We each have a noise in our heads, an agenda and something urgent that’s grabbing our attention. And so, the amount of interest you receive (or don’t receive) has little to do with how interesting you are and a lot to do with how the people you seek to serve have organized their priorities long before you got there.
June 4, 2022
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