Seth's Blog : Scarcity and abundance in the digital age

Scarcity and abundance in the digital age

Thankfully, for many people in the privileged world, food scarcity is an ancestral memory. We don't have to scrounge over lunch so we'll have something to eat for dinner.

Sandy reminded millions of people in the Northeast what scarcity felt like. When gasoline shortages hit, the thought that there might be a day or more without gas in the tank led to six-hour lines and occasional fistfights. Many grow up with a sense of unlimited... go ahead and gun the engine or throw out the extra, there's more around the corner.

And yet, physical goods always manage to bump up against scarcity. There's always one more shiny new thing to buy, one more mini-storage unit to rent. The media amplifies our envy of physical goods with reality TV shows and commercials about that next thing you ought to buy, if you hurry, if you can borrow to do so.

The digital world doesn't offer similar scarcity. Two generations have grown up with the understanding that all music is available essentially for free, all the time. Our internet connections are largely unlimited--and when the limits do kick in, our entitlement comes out in the form of umbrage at the affront.

But economies are always based on scarcity (hence the term 'economize'). There is no market for humming, for example, because everyone has unlimited humming at their disposal at all times. So, in the abundant digital world, what's scarce? Where is the economy?

It's in connection.

Who trusts you? Who wants to hear from you? Who will collaborate and support and engage with you?

These are things that don't scale to infinity. These are precious resources.

When there was no power during Sandy, people had to decide (for the first time in a long time) if a song on their phone was worth listening to. Was it battery worthy? That's the analysis that informs the connection economy--is it worth interrupting this person? Is my next action going to build a relationship or take from it? Am I earning trust or burning trust?

In the connection economy, we reward art and innovation and things worth talking about. We seek out transparency and generosity and the long-term. Sure, there are still people who will profit in the short-run by burning the assets they've got, but as we get ever more connected, that's just not going to scale.

Connection and leadership and trust are going to get ever more valuable. Sure, go ahead and shake your head in agreement, but when you get back to work, are you busy working in the scarce universe or trying to build a place for yourself in the new one?

Seth's Blog : On behalf of yes

On behalf of yes

Yes, it's okay to ship your work.

Yes, you're capable of making a difference.

Yes, it's important.

Yes, you can ignore that critic.

Yes, your bravery is worth it.

Yes, we believe in you.

Yes, you can do even better.

Yes.

Yes is an opportunity and yes is an obligation. The closer we get to people who are confronting the resistance on their way to making a ruckus, the more they let us in, the greater our obligation is to focus on the yes.

There will always be a surplus of people eager to criticize, nitpick or recommend caution. Your job, at least right now, is to reinforce the power of the yes.

Seth's Blog : Ideal, average and outlier

Ideal, average and outlier

Generalizations are the heart of marketing decision-making. When we look at an audience--customers, prospects, constituents--we make decisions on the whole based on our assumptions about the individuals within the group.

But are we basing those generalizations on our vision of the ideal member of the tribe, the average member or the outlier who got our attention?

It's easy, for example, to defend high-priced famous colleges if you focus on the ideal situation. The ideal student, getting instruction from the ideal professor and making ideal progress. No one can argue with this.

On the other hand, when we see the outlier (the person who is manipulating the system, or the one who is being harmed by it) it's easy to generalize in precisely the other direction, deciding that the entire system isn't worth saving.

And finally, it's tempting to rely on the average, to boil down populations of people into simple numbers. The problem with this, of course, is that if one foot is in a bucket of ice water and the other is being scalded, on average, you should be comfortable.

Before we start making decisions about markets, tribes and policy, we need to get clear about which signals we're using and what we're trying to focus on or improve.

Seth's Blog : Slow media

Slow media

Slow media is patient. It's not on a deadline. It isn't measured in column inches. It can be calm instead of sensational, deep instead of superficial.

In the age of "Breaking news, Emmy nominations announced!" and 140 characters, it's sort of surprising to realize that we are also living in the golden age of slow media.

For years, on Sunday mornings, you could find me sitting in my driveway, recently arrived home from one errand or another, listening to Krista Tippett's extraordinary interviews on the radio. Thanks to the web, there's no need to sit in your car any longer, and Krista's groundbreaking approach is spreading. Spending 90 minutes in the studio with her to create this week's show was, for me, one of the highlights of my career. (download).

When there's unlimited shelf space allowing unlimited podcasts, which can be of unlimited length, the goal isn't to get the show on the air faster or to make it noisier. Instead, the goal, like the goal of a good book, is to say something worth saying, and to do it in a way that's worth waiting for.

The challenge used to be to promote your idea enough to get on the radio or get into the newspaper. Of course, along the way your idea was truncated, edited, misconstrued, amped up and dumbed down, because scarce media space often demanded this.

Today, the challenge is, as Krista has shown, to be insightful enough and patient enough to use the (unlimited) time to create slow media that people actually want to listen to. Not all people, of course, but enough. Not media for the masses, but media for the weird, for people who care. It might not be obvious media, or easy to understand media, or easily digested media, but that's okay, because slow media is not mass media. Slow media is not for the distracted masses, it's for the focused few.

One of the greatest privileges of publishing The Icarus Deception and V is for Vulnerable is that I've had the chance to talk with some amazing podcasters. And to do it slowly. With focus.

Go ahead and subscribe to a few. Slow media is good for us.

Seth's Blog : The long run keeps getting shorter

The long run keeps getting shorter

In the long run, we're all dead, sure that's still true.

But the other long run effects--in the long run, you get caught, in the long run, kindness wins out, in the long run, we learn about who you really are--all of those are happening faster than they used to.

The short run has always been short (and it's getting shorter still). The real change, though, is how short the long run is getting.

Seth's Blog : Why do we care about football?

Why do we care about football?

For someone outside the US, the visceral connection with football seems mysterious. You can understand a lot about the future (and past) of marketing once you understand how the sport turned into a cultural touchstone.

Tribes -> TV -> Money -> Mass -> TV -> Tribes

Football as we know it started in colleges. It was an epic muddy battle, pitting one alma mater against another, a war-like, non-balletic battle that united (at a pretty elemental level) the tribes on each side. As it grew as a college sport, it became as much of a social event as a sporting one, with alumni and students finding connection around a game.

But if that's all it was, today wouldn't be the biggest day of the year for several industries. If that's all it was, you wouldn't be able to pick a fight merely by challenging the hegemony of football or the local team. We'd be spending as much time and energy on soccer or lacrosse or basketball, but we don't.

No, it turns out that, quite accidentally, football, more than any other sport, is made for television. It's better on TV than it is live. The combination of the play clock, the angles, the repetition and the opportunity for analysis all make it perfect to watch on TV. And perfect to run commercials on. TV and football grew up together, side by side. Instant replay and the thirty-second commercial, supporting each other.

It's not an accident that the commercials are as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game. The commercials represent both the cash component of football as well as the cultural souvenirs that go with our consumption of the game.

Fifty years ago, a coat salesman paid $4,000 for the rights to film a game, and NFL Films was born. The decisions Ed and Steve Sobel made over the years turned the sport cinematic, amplifying the tribal origins but taking them much further. They used sound editing and shot on film, all to transform a game into a spectacle.

Then, the second great accident occurred: As football became the official sport of television, it generated billions of dollars in revenue. This revenue led advertisers to push for more football, which led to more television, which led to colleges transforming football from a small sideline into a cash cow of some focus, despite the fact that it has very little to do with the core mission of the institution.

People justify the unpaid (and dangerous) labor of college football players by pointing to all the scholarships. But the scholarships aren't for playing football, they are for appearing on TV. That's what pays for the system.

The media-football complex drives deep into childhood, with many kids fast-tracked from a very young age into the game (not soccer, not baseball, not physics) at some level because of TV and because of money and because of tribes. If football is part of what we stand for, then of course we're happy to have our kid be part of that. But what does it mean for football to be part of what you stand for?

No one stands for movies, or ice cream or double-entry bookkeeping. No, a sport has become a pillar of our worldview, a tribal and economic connection to our past and our future. We don't want to understand the history and the money and the happy accidents. We just assume that this is as it was and as it will be.

Going forward, no other sport will ever have a run like this, because the TV-cash part of the connection can't be recreated. Mass TV built many elements of our culture, but mass TV (except for tonight) is basically over.

The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don't point everyone to one bit of content, don't trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.

The cultural touchstones we're building today are mostly not mass, mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact. Without the mass engine of TV, it's difficult to imagine it happening again. So instead we build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.

But for next season... Go Bills!

Seth's Blog : Customers who break things

Customers who break things

2% of your customers don't get it. They won't read the instructions, they'll use the wrong handle, they'll ignore the warning about using IE6. They will blame you for giving them a virus or will change the recipe even though you ask them not to.

And not only that, they'll blame you when things go wrong.

If you do a very, very good job of design and UX and process analysis, you can lower this number to 1%.

But then what?

The thing is, blaming this group for getting it wrong helps no one. They don't want to be blamed, and they're not going to learn.

The other challenge, of course, is that the 1% keep changing. If they were always the same people, you could happily fire them. But there's no way to know in advance who's going to get it wrong.

If you're going to be in a mass market business, you have no choice to but to accept that this group exists. And to embrace them. Not to blame them, but to love them. Successful businesses have the resilience to make it easy for them to recover. To make it easy for these people to find you and to blame you and to get the help they need.

Sure, whittle down the number. But the ones who are left? They're part of the deal.

Seth's Blog : How to listen

How to listen

Live interaction still matters. Teachers, meetings, presentations, one on one brainstorms--they can lead to real change. The listener has nearly as big a responsibility as the speaker does, though. And yet, Google reports four times as many matches for "how to speak" as "how to listen." It's not a passive act, not if you want to do it right.

If listening better leads to better speaking, then it becomes a competitive advantage.

Ask an entrepreneur leaving the office of a great VC like Fred Wilson. She'll tell you that she gave the best pitch of her career--largely because of the audience. The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.

Don't worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.

Pay the person who's speaking back with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.

Play back what you hear but in your own words, using your own situation. Don't ask questions as much as make statements, building on what you just heard but making it your own. Take what you heard and make it the foundation for what you are trying on as your next idea.

If you disagree, wait a few beats, let the thought finish, and then explain why. Don't challenge the speaker, challenge the idea.

The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.

Good listeners get what they deserve--better speakers.

Seth's Blog : Exactly the same vs. exactly different

Exactly the same vs. exactly different

You will almost never find a case study or lesson that precisely fits the problem you're aiming to solve. You won't find a book that shows you what someone precisely like you did to solve a problem precisely like this one.

The search for the exact case study or the exact prescription is the work of the resistance, a clever way to stay safe, to protect yourself from your boss or your self-talk. If you wait for the perfect map before departing on your journey, you'll never have to leave.

It's also true, though, that you have never once had to solve a problem that is exactly different from what's gone down before. We'd like to romanticize our problems as unique, as the one and only perfectly difficult situation that is the result of a confluence of unrepeatable, unique causes.

Your problem is your problem, and it is like no other. But it's close enough to those that came before, close enough to the ones you've studied, that it probably pays to stop stalling and take the leap.

Seth's Blog : Paracosms, loyalty and reality in the pursuit of creative problem solving

Paracosms, loyalty and reality in the pursuit of creative problem solving

A paracosm is an ornate, richly detailed imaginary world. Whether you're a three-year old with imaginary playmates, or a passionate inventor imagining how your insight will change just about everything, a paracosm gives you the opportunity to hypothesize, to try out big ideas and see where they take you.

Managers at established organizations have a very hard time with this. Take book publishing as an example. Ten or fifteen years ago, I'd sit with publishing chiefs and say, "let's imagine how the world looks when there are no mass market books published on paper..." Before we could get any further, they'd stop the exercise. "It's impossible to imagine that. Paper is magical. Are you saying you don't believe in books?" (I heard variations on this from people as recently as a year ago.)

The emotional response is easy to understand. If one of the core principles of your business needs to be abandoned in order to act out the paracosm, it feels disloyal to even utter it. Sort of like asking your spouse if he's going to remarry after you die...

And yet.

The most effective, powerful way to envision the future is to envision it, all of it, including a future that doesn't include your sacred cows. Only then can you try it on for size, imagine what the forces at work might be and then work to either prevent (or even better, improve on) that future and your role in it.

It's not disloyal to imagine a future that doesn't include your founding precepts. It's disloyal not to.

Seth's Blog : Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

[Of course, this post isn’t actually about airports].

I realized that I don’t dislike flying--I dislike airports. There are so many things we can learn from what they do wrong:

No one is in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down.
Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem. The TSA blames the facilities people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the user’s problem is the driver of behavior (as opposed to maintaining power or the status quo) things change.
The food is aimed squarely at the (disappearing) middle of the market. People who like steamed meat and bags of chips never have a problem finding something to eat at an airport. Apparently, profit-maximizing vendors haven’t realized that we’re all a lot weirder than we used to be.
Like colleges, airports see customers as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but they’ll still be here.
By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.
The TSA is ruled by superstition, not fact. They act without data and put on a quite serious but ultimately useless bit of theater. Ten years later, the theater is now becoming an entrenched status quo, one that gets ever worse.
The ad hoc is forbidden. Imagine an airplane employee bringing in an extension cord and a power strip to deal with the daily occurrence of travelers hunched in the corner around a single outlet. Impossible. There is a bias toward permanent and improved, not quick and effective.
Everyone is treated the same. Effective organizations treat different people differently. While there’s some window dressing at the edges (I’m thinking of slightly faster first class lines and slightly more convenient motorized cars for seniors), in general, airports insist that the one size they’ve chosen to offer fit all.
There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones. You can have a flight be cancelled, be strip searched or even go to the wrong airport. But all possibility for delight has been removed. It wouldn’t take much to completely transform the experience from a chore to a delight.
They are sterile. Everyone who passes through leaves no trace, every morning starts anew. There are no connections between people, either fellow passengers or the staff. No one says, “welcome back,” and that’s honest, because no one feels particularly welcome.
No one is having any fun. Most people who work at airports have precisely the same demeanor as people who work at a cemetery. The system has become so industrialized that personal expression is apparently forbidden.
As we see at many organizations that end up like this, the airport mistakes its market domination for a you-have-no-choice monopoly (we do have a choice, we stay home). And in pursuit of reliable, predictable outcomes, these organizations dehumanize everything, pretending it will increase profits, when it actually does exactly the opposite.

Seth's Blog : A legend in my own mind

A legend in my own mind

Everyone lives with self mythology.

The more important a memory is to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the more often we rehearse the memory. And the more often we relive those memories, the less likely it is that they are true.

Despite our shared conception that we are rational actors making intelligent decisions based on an accurate view of the world and ourselves, precisely the opposite is true. Your customers, your workers, you and I, we are all figments of our imaginations.

Understanding the mythology of your partner, your customer and your audience is far more important than watching the instant replay of what actually happened.

Seth's Blog : Beyond showing up

Beyond showing up

You've probably got that part nailed. Butt in seat, smile on your face. We often run into people who understand their job to be showing up on time to do the work that's assigned.

We've moved way beyond that now. Showing up and taking notes isn't your job. Your job is to surprise and delight and to change the agenda. Your job is to escalate, reset expectations and make us delighted that you are part of the team.

Showing up is overrated. Necessary but not nearly sufficient.

Seth's Blog : "We don't need to make it better"

"We don't need to make it better"

Improvement comes with many costs.

It costs time and money to make something better. It's risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.

Which is why, unless there's an urgent reason to make something better right now, most organizations naturally don't volunteer to improve.

Operating systems, government programs, established non-profits, teachers with tenure, market leaders, businesses with long-standing customers--these organizations are all facing an uphill battle in creating a culture where there's an urgency to improve.

Just because it's uphill doesn't mean it's hopeless, though. One of the most essential tasks a leader faces is understanding just how much the team is afraid of making things better (because it usually means making things worse--for some people).

Seth's Blog : Getting a ridiculous behemoth (and two California gigs)

Getting a ridiculous behemoth (and two California gigs)

Many of you that missed out on pre-ordering the 800 page behemoth that I published late last year have asked for a chance to get one. Since you're the biggest sneezers of the ideas in my books, I thought I'd put together a simple fundraiser for the Acumen Fund (limited to the first 200 people).

Visit this page and order a pre-set package of books from 8CR and I'll send you, at my expense, one of the last remaining copies of the Behemoth. (US orders only, please, because shipping costs so much). I'll also make a $10,000 donation to Acumen in the name of those that get in on it.

ALSO! I've been invited to come to LA on March 16 as the opening keynote (program, tickets) for a day-long conference, and also to appear in Costa Mesa, CA on the evening of the 15th.

You can get your Costa Mesa ticket with a few books thrown in as a bonus by clicking here.

Seth's Blog : A diet for your mind

A diet for your mind

It's Groundhog Day, which means that January is over. January, of course, is official diet book month, the time of year that formerly young, formerly thin people buy books in the hopes that by osmosis, they will magically become post-holiday skinny.

Now that this madness is over, perhaps it's time to invest in something you can change: the way you think. Here are a bunch of books, ebooks and recordings that can help with that: Diet books for the mind.
Controlling what you eat is an interesting challenge, but not nearly as important as controlling how you think.

Seth's Blog : You'll pay a lot...

You'll pay a lot...

but you'll get more than you pay for.

There's plenty of room for this sort of offer to work. The hard part isn't charging a lot. The hard part is delivering more (in the eye of the recipient) than he paid for.

Plenty of people would happily pay extra for what you do... if they only believed that in fact it would turn out to be a bargain, worth more than it costs. One reason we price shop is that we don't trust that anything that costs more than the cheapest is worth what it costs.

Too often, in the race to charge less, we deliver too little. And in the race to charge more, we forget what it is that people want. They want more. And better.

Seth's Blog : Owning vs. renting

Owning vs. renting

You don't own attention or trust or shelf space. You don't even own tomorrow's plans.

It's all for rent, with a cancellation clause that can kick in at any time.

The moment you start treating the rental like a right, it disappears.