Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (51 page)

Some ways to think about this:

• George Clooney (in
  Up in the Air
  ) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
  
• Farmers don’t dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
  
• Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site; farmers like Facebook.
  
• When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
  
• Farmers prefer productive meetings; hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
  
• Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
  
• Hunters want a high-stakes mission; farmers want to avoid epic failure.
  
• Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
  
• The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters who are able to stick with it for the long haul.
  
• A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
  
• One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment, and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
  
• A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.
  

Whom are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?

Here are things that you can now avoid:

• The annual review
  
• The annual sales conference
  
• The big product launch
  
• The grand opening of a new branch
  
• Drop-dead, one-shot negotiation events
  

The reasons? Well, they don’t work. They don’t work because big events leave little room for iteration, for trial and error, for earning rapport. And the biggest reason: frequent cheap communication is easier than ever, and if you use it, you’ll discover that the process creates far more gains than events ever can.

Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for, and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience, and repeat.

Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It’s difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it’s a huge pain in the neck to do reliably.

Schools like teaching compliance. They’re pretty good at it.

To top it off, until recently the customers of a school or training program (the companies that hire workers) were buying compliance by the bushel. Initiative was a red flag, not an asset.

Of course, now that’s all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

Old-time factories had a linear layout because there was just one steam engine driving one drive shaft. Every machine in the shop had to line up under the shaft (connected by a pulley) in order to get power.

That metaphor extended to the people working in the factory. Each person was hired and trained and arranged to maximize output. The goal was to engage the factory, to feed it, maintain it, and have it produce efficiently.

Distribution was designed in sync with the factory. You wanted to have the right number of trucks and drivers to handle whatever the factory produced and to get it where it needed to go.

Marketing was driven by the factory as well. The goal of marketing was to sell whatever the factory could produce in a given month, for as much money and with as little overhead as possible.

And things like customer service and community relations were expenses, things you did in order to keep the factory out of trouble.

So …

What happens when the factory goes away?

What if the organization has no engine in the center that makes something? What if that’s outsourced? What if you produce a service or traffic in ideas? What happens when the revolution comes along (the post-industrial revolution) and now all the value lies in the stuff you used to do because you had to, not because you wanted to?

Now it doesn’t matter where you sit. Now it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re adding to the efficiency or productivity of the machine. Now you don’t market to sell what you made; you make things to satisfy the market. Now, the market and the consumer and the idea trump the system.

Suddenly, the power is in a different place, and the organization must change or else the doughnut collapses.

The ’Net has spawned two new ways to create and consume culture.

The first way is the wide-open door for amateurs who want to create. This is blogging and online art, Wikipedia, and the maker movement. These guys get a lot of press, and deservedly so, because they’re changing everything.

The second way, though, is distracting and ultimately a waste. We’re
creating a culture of clickers, stumblers, and jaded spectators who decide in the space of a moment whether to watch and participate (or not).

Imagine if people went to the theater or the movies and stood up and walked out after the first six seconds. Imagine if people went to the senior prom and bailed on their date three seconds after the car pulled away from the curb.

The majority of people who sign up for a new online service rarely or never use it. The majority of YouTube videos are watched for just a few seconds. Chatroulette institutionalizes the glance-and-click mentality. I’m guessing that more than half the people who started reading this post never finished it.

This is all easy to measure. And it drives people with something to accomplish crazy, because they want visits to go up, clicks to go up, eyeballs to go up.

Should I write blog posts that increase my traffic or that help change the way (a few) people think?

Should a charity focus on instant donations by texting from a million people, or is it better to seek dedicated attention and support from a few who understand the mission and are there for the long haul?

More and more often, we’re seeing products and services coming to market designed to appeal to the momentary attention of the clickers.
The
Huffington Post
has downgraded itself, pushing thoughtful stories down the page in exchange for link bait and sensational celebrity riffs. This strategy gets page views, but does it generate thought or change?

If you create (or market), should you be chasing the people who click and leave? Or is it like trying to turn a cheetah into a house pet? Is manipulating the high-voltage attention stream of millions of caffeinated Web surfers a viable long-term strategy?

Mass marketing used to be able to have it both ways. Money bought you an audience. Now, the only things that buy you a mass market are wow and speed. Wow keeps getting harder to achieve and dives for the lowest common denominator at the same time.

Time
magazine started manipulating the cover and then the contents in order to boost newsstand sales. They may have found a short-term solution, but the magazine is doomed precisely because the people
they are pandering to don’t really pay attention and aren’t attractive to advertisers.

My fear is that the endless search for wow further coarsens our culture at the same time it encourages marketers to get ever more shallow. That’s where the first trend comes in: the artists, idea merchants, and marketers that are having the most success are ignoring those that would rubberneck and drive on, and are focusing instead on cadres of fans that matter. Fans that will give permission, fans that will return tomorrow, fans that will spread the word to others that can also take action.

Culture has been getting faster and shallower for hundreds of years, and I’m not the first crusty pundit to decry the demise of thoughtful inquiry and deep experiences. The interesting question here, though, is not how fast is too fast, but what works? What works to change mindsets, to spread important ideas, and to create an audience for work that matters? What’s worth your effort and investment as a marketer or creator?

The difference this time is that drive-by culture is both fast
and
free. When there’s no commitment of money or time in the interaction, can change or commerce really happen? Just because you can measure eyeballs and page views doesn’t mean you should.

In the race between “who” and “how many,”
who
usually wins—if action is your goal. Find the right people, those that are willing to listen to what you have to say, and ignore the masses that are just going to race on, unchanged.

I met a new addition to the family the other day. She was eleven days old.

It was the warmest day of her whole life the day I was there. And she had just eaten her biggest meal ever.

Firsts
are fun and exciting, and it’s neat to keep topping ourselves.

I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I’m never going to eat tuna ever again, and that I’m never going to be able to easily walk onto a shuttle flight at the last minute and just show up in Boston.
Never
is a lot harder than
first
, but I guess you get used to it.

The Internet is like Ice-Nine. It changes what it touches, probably
forever. We keep discovering firsts—the biggest viral video ever, the most Twitter followers ever, the fastest bestseller ever. And we constantly discover nevers as well. There’s never going to be a mass-market TV show that rivals the ones that came before. There’s never going to be a worldwide brand built by advertising ever again, either. And Michael Jackson’s record deal is the last one of its kind. And there may never be a job like that job you used to have, either.

Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they go only one way. It’s like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backward, try to slow it down, fight the rotation … and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works.

It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore, and show an ability to comply with expectations. If I want the real truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d rather see something else. I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections:

• Truth
  
• Assertions
  
• Alternatives
  
• People
  
• Money
  

The
Truth
section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, the technology standards, the ways that others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific, the better. The more ground knowledge, the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The point of this section is to be sure that you’re clear about the way you see the world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn’t partisan, it takes no positions, it just states how things are.

Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include
spreadsheets, market share analysis, and anything I need to know about how the world works.

The
Assertions
section is your chance to describe how you’re going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action.

This is the heart of the modern business plan. The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you’re going to do and what impact it’s going to have.

Of course, this section will be incorrect. You will make assertions that won’t pan out. You’ll miss budgets and deadlines and sales. So the
Alternatives
section tells me what you’ll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don’t pan out, is it over?

The People section rightly highlights the key element: who is on your team, who is going to join your team. “Who” doesn’t mean their résumés; “who” means their attitudes and abilities and track records in shipping.

And the last section is all about money. How much you’ll need, how you’ll spend it, what cash flow will look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins, and exit strategies.

Your local VC might not like this format, but I’m betting it will help your team think through the hard issues more clearly.

Factories used to be arranged in a straight line. That’s because there was one steam engine, and it turned a shaft. All the machines were set up along the shaft, with a belt giving each of them power. The office needed to be right next to this building, so management could monitor what was going on.

A hundred and fifty years later, why go to work in an office/plant/factory?

1. That’s where the machines are.
   
2. That’s where the items I need to work on are.
   
3. The boss needs to keep tabs on my productivity.
   
4. There are important meetings to go to.
   
5. It’s a source of energy.
   
6. The people I collaborate with all day are there.
   
7. I need someplace to go.
   

But …

1. If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
   
2. If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
   
3. The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
   
4. How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?
   
5. You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
   
6. Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
   
7. So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.
   

If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable that we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think that in ten years the TV show
The Office
will be seen as a quaint antique.