Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (52 page)

When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.

The gain in speed, productivity, and happiness is massive. What’s missing is #7—someplace to go. Once someone figures that part out, the office is dead.

The first revolution hit when people who made stuff started to discover that information was often as valuable as the stuff itself. Knowing where
something was or how it performed or how it interacted with you could be worth more than the item itself.

Frito Lay dominates the snack business because of the information infrastructure they built on top of their delivery model. 7-Eleven in Japan dominated for a decade or more because they used information to change their inventory. Zara in Europe is an information business that happens to sell clothes.

You’ve probably already guessed what’s important now: information about information. That’s what Facebook and Google and Bloomberg do for a living. They create a meta layer, a world of information about the information itself.

And why is this so valuable? Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage in the stock market. Or in marketing. Or in fund-raising.

Many people and organizations are contributing to this mass of data, but few are taking advantage of the opportunity to collate it and present it to people who desperately need it. Think about how much information needs to be sorted, compared, updated, and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it.

The race to deliver this essential scalable asset isn’t over; it’s just beginning.

New times demand new words, because the old words don’t help us see the world differently.

Along the way, I’ve invented a few, and it occurs to me that sometimes I use them as if you know what I’m talking about. Here, with plenty of links, are 26 of my favorite neologisms (the longest post of the year, probably):

A is for Artist:
an artist is someone who brings humanity to a problem, who changes someone else for the better, who does work that can’t be written down in a manual. Art is not about oil painting; it’s about bringing creativity and insight to work, instead of choosing to be a compliant cog. (From
Linchpin
)

B is for Bootstrapper:
a bootstrapper is someone who starts a business with no money and
funds growth through growth
. The Internet has made bootstrapping much easier than ever, because the costs of creating and marketing remarkable things are lower than ever. It’s really important not to act like you’re well-funded if you’re intent on bootstrapping (and vice versa). You can read the
Bootstrapper’s Bible
for free.

C is for Choice:
I didn’t coin the term the Long Tail
,
but I wish I had. It describes a simple law: given the choice, people will take the choice. That means that digital commerce enables niches. The practice of aggregating and enabling the long tail accounts for the success of eBay, iTunes, Amazon, Craigslist, Google, and even
Match.com
.

D is for Darwin:
things evolve. But evolution is speeding up (and yes, evolving). While it used to take a hundred thousand years for significant changes to happen to our physical culture, the nature of information and a connected society means that “everything” might change in just a few months. Ideas that spread, win, and organizations that learn from their mistakes lead the rest of us. (From
Survival Is Not Enough
)

E is for Edgecraft:
brainstorming doesn’t work so well, because most people are bad at it. They’re bad at it because their lizard brain takes over moments before a big idea is uttered. “Oh, no!” it says; “I better not say that because if I do, then I’ll have to do it.” And so brainstorming quickly becomes clever stalling and time-wasting. Far better is to practice edgecraft. Someone announces a direction (“we’ll be really convenient; we’ll offer our menu by fax”) and then the next person goes closer to that edge, topping it (“we’ll offer it by email!”), and so on, each topping the other in any particular direction. (From the book
Free Prize Inside
)

F is for the Free Prize:
people often don’t buy the obvious or measured solution to their problem; they buy the extra, the bonus, the feeling, and the story. The free prize is the layout of Google—the search results are the same, but the way the search feels is why you choose to search there. If engineers thought more about the free prize, we’d need fewer marketers.

G is for Go go go™:
I just trademarked this one, but you have my permission to use it all you like. Go go go is the mantra of someone who has committed to defeating their anxiety and ignoring their lizard brain.
Not a good strategy for airline pilots, but for the rest of us, a little Go go go might be just the ticket.

H is for broken:
Isn’t it just like a marketer to compromise when he should have organized better in the first place? There’s a lot in our consumer society that’s broken, but try to avoid getting obsessed with it. Far better to ship your own stuff that’s not broken instead.

I is for Ideavirus:
a decade ago, I wrote a book that was free. [It still is.] It argues that ideas that spread, win, and you can architect and arrange and manipulate your ideas to make them more likely to spread. Note that I’m not saying you can add gimmicks and spam and networking to spread your idea. I’m saying that the idea itself is more or less likely to spread based on how you design it.

J is for Just looking:
When there are plenty of choices and everything is a click away, I’m very unlikely to take action, certainly unlikely to actually buy something from you. I’ll do it tomorrow. Or the day after. Which means the only way you create action is to produce an emergency. Why now? Why not later …

K is for kindle:
No, not the ebook reader. Kindle as in patiently starting a fire. The TV era demanded blockbuster launches of blockbuster products aimed at the masses. The Internet responds better to bonfires that are kindled over time, to ideas that spread because the idea itself, not the hype or the promotion, is the engine.

L is for Lizard Brain:
this is a huge impediment to getting what you want, finding your calling, and satisfying your customers. The lizard brain is near your brain stem, including your amygdala. It’s the part of your brain responsible for anger, revenge, fear, anxiety, and reproduction. It’s the original brain, the one that wild animals possess. Steve Pressfield has named the voice of the lizard: it’s the Resistance. The Resistance rationalizes, hides, and sabotages your best work.

M is for Meatball Sundae:
this is the unfortunate combination of traditional products and services (designed for low price and good quality) with the high-growth nature of the idea-driven Internet. When your boss tells you to build a viral campaign about some lame product gathering dust in the warehouse, she’s asking you to build a meatball sundae and you should flee.

N is for NOBS:
otherwise known as the
new-order business school
. My rant about this points out that for most people, a traditional MBA is a waste of both time and money. The two biggest benefits—the selection process of getting in and the social process of networking—could be accomplished, in a Swiftian fashion, without any classes at all.

O is for Orangutan:
I could have used the word
monkey
, but I already had an M listing, plus I love the way you spell orangutan. Anyway, the primate is the best way to think about how people interact with websites. They’re like monkeys in a psychology experiment, looking for the banana. Where’s the banana? they ask. Of course, I don’t know the monkey word for banana, so I’m paraphrasing. If your website offers a banana, people are going to click on it. If it doesn’t, they’ll leave. My argument for banana design is in
The Big Red Fez
.

P is for Permission:
anticipated, personal, and relevant messages will always outperform spam. Obvious, but true. So then why do you persist in spamming people? Billboards, TV ads, phone calls—they all are defeated soundly by delivering your offers with permission. In fact, the biggest asset a company can build online is this privilege, the list of people who would miss you if you didn’t show up. The original interview appeared (12 years ago!) in
Fast Company
.

Q is for Quitting:
sticking things out is overrated, particularly if you stick out the wrong things. In fact, I think you’d be much better off quitting most of what you do so you have the resources to get through the hard slog I call the Dip. The challenge, then, is to not quit in the Dip, but instead to quit everything else so you have the focus to get through the slog of what matters.

R is for Remarkable:
a purple cow is remarkable because it’s worth talking about. Not because you, the marketer, said it was, but because I, the consumer, did. And in a world without effective, scalable advertising, remarkable products and services are the single best way to succeed.

S is for Sneezer:
What do we call someone who spreads an idea the way some people spread a virus? Seek them out, cater to them, organize them.

T is for Tribe:
human beings evolved to be attracted to tribes. Groups
of like-minded people who share a culture, a connection, and, perhaps, a goal. And each of these tribes seeks leadership. The opportunity for marketers today isn’t to sell more average stuff to more average people. The opportunity is to find and connect and lead tribes of people, taking them somewhere they want to go.

U is for Ululate:
not because it’s relevant, just because it’s the single best word in the English language. Can I sneak an extra C? The cliff business.

V is for Very good:
no one cares about very good. I can get very good from just about anyone, and certainly cheaper than I can get it from you. We don’t have a competence shortage, not anymore. No, I’m going to pay extra only for the personal, the magical, the artistic, and the work of the linchpin.

W is for Worldview:
I first encountered this term via George Lakoff. Your worldview is the set of expectations and biases you bring to a situation before any new data appear. Some people hear a politician say something and hate it, while others are thrilled by it. Is it the thing that was said or the person who said it? Some people hear that Apple is about to launch a new product and they get out their wallets; others flee—before they even know what it is. If you don’t understand the worldview of the people you’re selling to, you
will
fail.

X is for Xebec:
I hate it when A-to-Z list makers cheap out on the X. Hey, a xebec is a three-masted schooner. And it’s obsolete. Just like CDs, newspapers, and a whole host of interesting but dated business models. Sorry. Imagine someone saying: “he’s a nice guy, but that company he works for is a xebec.”

Y is for You:
you, the artist. You, the one who makes a difference. You, the one who stands for something and now has the leverage (and access to the market) to actually ship. Go go go.™

Z is for Zoometry:
originally a term from zoology (pronounced zo-ology, in case you were curious), zoometry is the science of instigating and learning from change. This is the revolution of our time, the biggest one in history, and it’s not just about silly videos on YouTube. One by one, industry by industry, the world is being remade again and again, and the agents of change are the winners.

Commerce is about pricing, and pricing is about scarcity. Scarcity, of course, demands no easy substitutes.

Some news websites are foolishly putting up pay walls, requiring readers to pay by the day or the year to see what’s there. This is foolish because substitutes are so easy to find. If I can’t get to the
Times of London
or
Time
magazine, no problem; I’ll find the same news (or almost the same news) somewhere else.

This is the mistake that book publishers are making on the Kindle. I was mildly interested in the new biography of Henry Luce. But it’s $19 on the Kindle. That’s outrageous in a world where there are plenty (more than I can ever read) of great biographies for less than $10 on this very same device. (In fact, I can buy
The Man Time Forgot,
the biography of his forgotten partner, the actual founder of
Time
, for $4 in paperback or $10 on the Kindle.) Is a biography about someone else a perfect substitute? Not if you’re writing your dissertation about Luce, no, it’s not. But the publishers seek a broader audience than that, don’t they?

The Internet has dramatically widened the number of available substitutes. You don’t have to like it, but it’s true. That means you have to work far harder to create work that can’t easily be replaced.

All those devices in your bag make it easier than ever to stay in sync.

You can reap what you sow in FarmVille, keep up with your email, know what’s going on in every important blog, be in the right room at the right time earning badges, etc. You can be synchronized at all times.

And if you get a little out of sync, just a little, it’s painful. One more reason you might want to stop reading this and check your feeds.

Building your success on being more in sync than everyone else is a sharp edge to walk on. You’ll always be near the edge of perfect sync, but never there.

The alternative is to be a
lot
out of sync.

People who are way out of sync with the digital maelstrom of the moment aren’t always bad followers. They might be great leaders.

PART 1: THE BOTTOM IS IMPORTANT

Almost a third of the world’s population earns $2.50 or less a day. The enormity of this disparity takes my breath away, but there’s an interesting flip side to it: that’s a market of more than $5 billion
a day
. Add the next segment ($5 a day) and it’s easy to see that every single day, the poorest people in the world spend more than $10 billion to live their lives.