Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (42 page)

If you’re Kraft, this is a good place to be. Singles mint money. My friend Nancy worked on this brand. It’s a miracle.

If you’re anyone else, forget about becoming more normal than they are, more regular than the regular kind. That slot is taken.

Most mature markets have their own version of Kraft Singles. The challenge for an insurgent is not to try to battle the incumbent for the slot of normal. The challenge is to be edgy and remarkable and to have the market move its center to you.

There are two jobs available to most of us:

You can be the person or the organization that’s perfect. The one that always ships on time, without typos, that delivers flawlessly and dots every
i.
You can be the hosting company or the doctor that might be boring but is always right.

Or you can be the person or the organization that’s interesting. The thing about being interesting, making a ruckus, creating remarkable products, and being magnetic is that you have to be that way only once in a while. No one is expected to be interesting all the time.

FedEx vs. Playwrights Horizons.

When an interesting person is momentarily not-interesting, I wait patiently. When a perfect organization, the boring one that’s constantly using its policies to dumb things down, is imperfect, I get annoyed. Because perfect has to be perfect all the time.

Economies of scale are well understood. Bigger factories are more efficient, bigger distribution networks are more efficient, bigger ad campaigns can be more efficient. It’s often hard to defeat a major competitor, particularly if the market is looking for security and the status quo.

But what about the economies of small? Is being bigger an intrinsic benefit in and of itself?

If your goal is to make a profit, it’s entirely possible that less overhead and a more focused product line will increase it.

If your goal is to make more art, it’s entirely possible that ridding yourself of obligations and scale will help you do that.

If your goal is to have more fun, it’s certainly likely that avoiding the high stakes of more debt, more financing, and more stuff will help with that.

I think we embraced scale as a goal when the economies of that scale were so obvious that we didn’t even need to mention them. Now that it’s so much easier to produce a product in the small and to market a product in the small, and now that it’s so beneficial to offer a service to just a few, with focus and attention, perhaps we need to rethink the very goal of scale.

Don’t be small because you can’t figure out how to get big. Consider being small because it might be better.

You’d think that it’s the most important thing in the world. Homecoming queen, student-body president, the most Facebook friends, Oscar winner, how many people are waiting in line at the book signing …

Popular is almost never a measure of impact, or genius, or art, though. Popular rarely correlates with guts, hard work, or a willingness to lead (and to be wrong along the way).

I’ll grant you that being popular (at least on one day in November) is a great way to get elected president. But in general, the search for popular is wildly overrated, because it corrupts our work, eats away at
our art, and makes it likely that we’ll compromise to please the anonymous masses.

Worth considering is the value of losing school elections and other popularity contests. Losing reminds you that the opinion of unaffiliated strangers is worthless. They don’t know you, they’re not interested in what you have to offer, and you can discover that their rejection actually means nothing. It will empower you to do even bigger things in the future.

When you focus on delighting an audience you care about, you strip the masses of their power.

Your brand is your favorite. After all, it’s yours. You understand it, you helped build it, you’re obsessed with the nuance behind it. Your organization’s actions make sense to you, you sat in the room as they were being argued about … you might even have helped make some of the decisions.

So, your brand doesn’t do anything wrong. What it does is the best it could do under the circumstances. Someone who knew what you know would make the very same decision, because under the circumstances it was the only/best option.

Of course we should buy from you. You’re better!

When your brand starts falling behind a competitor (Dell vs. Apple, Microsoft vs. Google, Washington Mutual vs. Everyone, and then Apple vs. Android, Google vs. Facebook), you say it’s not fair, or expected.

The problem with brand exceptionalism is that once you believe it, it’s almost impossible to innovate. Innovation involves failure, which an exceptional brand shouldn’t meet with, and the only reason to endure failure is to get ahead, which you don’t need to do. Because you’re exceptional.

In the battle for attention or market share, the market makes new decisions every day. And the market tends to be selfish. Often, it will pick the arrogant market leader (because the market also tends to be lazy), but upstarts and new competitors always have an incentive to change the game or the story.

Brand humility is the only response to a fast-changing and competitive marketplace. The humble brand understands that it needs to re-earn attention, re-earn loyalty, and reconnect with its audience as if every day is the first day.

The explosion of media channels and public events means that more people are being interviewed about more topics than ever before. It might even happen to you … and soon.

1. They call it
   giving
   an interview, not taking one, and for good reason. If you’re not eager to share your perspective, don’t bother showing up.
   
2. Questions shouldn’t be taken literally. The purpose of the question is to give you a chance to talk about something you care about. The audience wants to hear what you have to say, and if the question isn’t right on point, answer a different one instead.
   
3. In all but the most formal media settings, it’s totally appropriate to talk with the interviewer in advance, to give her some clues about what you’re interested in discussing. It makes you both look good.
   
4. The interviewer is not your friend, and everything you say is on the record. If you don’t want it to be in print, don’t say it.
   
5. If you get asked the same question from interview to interview, there’s probably a good reason. Saying, “I get asked that question all the time,” and then grimacing in pain, is disrespectful to the interviewer and the audience. See rule #1.
   
6. If your answers aren’t interesting, exciting, or engaging, that’s your fault, not the interviewer’s. See rule #2.
   

I wonder if Jerry ever got jealous of acts that were able to put songs on the radio. (The Dead had exactly one hit record.)

I hope not. Jerry was in a different business. Sure, he played music. Elton John also plays music. But they were in different businesses,
performing for different audiences, generating revenue in different ways, creating different sorts of art.

In a world filled with metrics and bestseller lists, it’s easy to decide that everyone is your competitor, and easier still to worry about your rank. Worry all you want, but if it gets in the way of your art or starts changing your mission, it’s probably a mistake.

It used to be that the non-customers, passersby, and quiet critics of your venture were totally invisible to you. They drove by, or muttered under their breath, or simply went to someone else. Now, all is visible. Just because you’re vividly aware of your shortcomings in market share doesn’t mean it’s important.

The next time you have a choice between chasing the charts (whichever charts you keep track of) and doing the work your customers crave, do the work instead.

Kevin asked me: “Do ‘great ideas’ possess universally some sort of Wow Factor?”

The problems with this question: What does “great” mean? And who decides what “wow” is?

The challenge is this: lots of people think they know what both words mean in their area of endeavor, and many of them are wrong.

Consider the case of Web 2.0 companies. People like Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are brilliant at understanding what wow means from an investor’s point of view. They have great taste about what’s going to pay off. They have a sense for which teams and which ideas will actually turn into great businesses.

The peanut galleries at tech sites, though, don’t have such great abilities (if they did, they’d be Brad, not anonymous voters). As a result, they mistake consumer wow for investor wow, and they often focus on the wrong attributes when they’re criticizing or congratulating a company.

This tendency is endemic in the book business, which resolutely refuses to understand the actual P&L of most of the books it publishes. As a result, there are plenty of editors who continue to overpay for the wrong books, because their wow isn’t the market’s wow.

In his book
Moneyball
, Michael Lewis wrote about how virtually every single scout and manager in baseball was wrong about what makes a great baseball player. They had the wrong radar, the wrong wow. When statistics taught a few teams what the real wow was, the balance of power shifted.

By definition, just about every great idea resonates early with those who have better radar than with those who don’t. The skill, then, is to expose yourself often enough, learn enough, and fail enough that you get to say wow before the competition does.

The two best ways to break through a rut and to make an impact:

• Find things that others have accepted as the status quo and make them significantly, noticeably, and remarkably better.
  
• Find things that you’re attached to that are slowing you down, realize that they are broken beyond repair, and eliminate them. Toss them away and refuse to use them any longer.
  

When a not-so-good software tool or a habit or an agency or a policy has too much inertia to be fixed, when it’s unbetterable, you’re better off without it. Eliminating it will create a void, fertile territory for something much better to arrive.

Given how much we talk about it, it’s surprising that there’s a lot of confusion about what quality is.

Which is a higher-quality car: a one-year-old Honda Civic or a brand-new, top-of-the-line Bentley?

It turns out that there are at least two useful ways to describe quality, and the conflict between them leads to the confusion:

Quality of design:
Thoughtfulness and processes that lead to user delight, that make it likely that someone will seek out a product, pay extra for it, or tell a friend.

Quality of manufacture:
Removing any variation in tolerances that a user will notice or care about.

In the case of the Civic, the quality of manufacture is clearly higher by any measure. The manufacturing is more exact, so the likelihood is tiny that the car will perform (or not perform) in a way you don’t expect.

On the other hand, we can probably agree that the design of the Bentley is more bespoke, luxurious, and worthy of comment.

Let’s think about manufacturing variations for a second: FedEx promises overnight delivery. Delivery at 10:20 vs. delivery at 10:15 is not something the recipient cares about. Tomorrow vs. Thursday, they care about a lot. The goal of the manufacturing process isn’t to reach the perfection of infinity. It’s to drive tolerances so hard that the consumer doesn’t care about the variation. Spending an extra million dollars to get five minutes faster isn’t as important to the FedEx brand as is spending a million dollars to make the website delightful.

Dropbox is a company that got both right. The design of the service is so useful that it now seems obvious. At the same time, though, and most critically, the manufacture of the service is to a very high tolerance. Great design in a backup service would be useless if one in a thousand files were corrupted.

Microsoft struggles (when they struggle) because sometimes they get both wrong. Software that has a user interface that’s a pain to use rarely leads to delight, and bugs represent significant manufacturing defects, because sometimes (usually just before a presentation), the software doesn’t work as expected—a
noticed
variation.

The Shake Shack, many New York burger fans would argue, is a higher-quality fast-food experience than McDonald’s, as evidenced by lines out the door and higher prices. Except from a production point of view. The factory that is McDonald’s far outperforms the small chain in terms of efficient production of the designed goods within certain tolerances. It’s faster and more reliable. And yet, many people choose to pay extra to eat at Shake Shack. Because it’s “better.” Faster doesn’t matter as much to the Shake Shack customer.

The balance, then, is to understand that marketers want both. A shortsighted CFO might want neither.

Deming defined quality as: (result of work effort)/(total costs). Unless you understand both parts of that fraction, you’ll have a hard time allocating your resources.

Consider what Philip Crosby realized a generation ago: quality is free.

It’s cheaper to design marketing quality into the product than it is to advertise the product.

It’s cheaper to design manufacturing quality into a factory than it is to inspect it after the product has already been built.

These quality definitions go hand in hand. Don’t tell me about server uptime if your interface is lame or the attitude of the people answering the phone is obnoxious. Don’t promise me a brilliant new service if you’re unable to show up for the meeting. Don’t show me a boring manuscript with no typos in it, and don’t try to sell me a brilliant book so filled with errors that I’m too distracted to finish it.

There are two reasons that quality of manufacture is diminishing in importance as a competitive tool:

A. Incremental advances in this sort of quality get increasingly more expensive. Going from one defect in a thousand to one in a million is relatively cheap. Going from one in a million to one in a billion, though, costs a fortune.