Listening to “expert consultants” give me list after list of how to be successful doing something they do not do is a sure fire way to send me to my happy place. Fortunately, while there I was able to codify an idea that had been hounding me for some time.

While a particular “expert consultant” was detailing Vogue-style for me the 10 Things That Will Cause A Creative Venture to Fail and the 4 Quick Fixes for Something Something Not Listening I wrote this, my only note from the presentation, on a note card.

Everything Works. But Not for You.

Listening to practicing experts is great, and I do it as much as I can. But every project, every venture, every artist, book, blog, website, podcast and business is unique. Listening to the lists pushed by Snake Oil Salesman and Industry Pundits will have you imitating the success of someone they’ve only read about, and you’ll fail because you are not that person.

Everything works. But that doesn’t mean it will work for you. Your situation is unique, so don’t fail by trying to follow the lists you found on the internet. Brew some coffee, sit down with a sharpie and blank sheet of paper and try something crazy.

This post is as much for me as it is for you.

But Even Today…

I see everyday the remnants of segregation, overhear lingering discrimination of all sorts, and live among the great-grandchildren of slaves. As someone known for his stoicism, I may shock you when I say it is still painful after a year. Old habits, it seems, die very very hard; native sons and daughters of The South born and raised in this culture do not see their behavior and understand their prejudices in the same way I do, and as the rest of the nation would.

While I do believe that reconciliation is possible, and that one day these egregious wrongs can be made right, I am still a pessimist; I believe that the only realistic outcome in the longer-near term will be that society moves on to the next great horror and our national guilt is assuaged only in redirection.

The Great Fear

Which brings me to the great fear that is the center of this short article. Reading of the great movements of the 1950s and 1960s I fear we may never see another Dr. King to lead us to next mountaintop. To develop this point briefly, the social movements of the 1960s grew out of a specific soil – the culture and ideas, the history, etc. If full civil rights and citizenship had been instituted after the abolition of slavery, Rosa Parks would never have been asked to move.

The social and media fabric of the time were just two of many necessary ingredients that leavened the bread. The media revolution that has occurred since, and continues even now, may be the new ingredient that spoils the dough.

The Media Revolution

The steady change in media since the 1950s, easily observable in the last 10 years, has been the diversification and fragmentation of media of every sort. TV stations, radio stations, websites, podcasts, newspapers, magazines, blogs and every type of media have multiplied in quantity exponentially since Dr. King was assassinated. It seems this makes it much more difficult for a broad movement to take root in the soil of our time. Because we now have hundreds of channels for the consumption of news, and humans tend to select sources which reinforce existing ideas, getting broad exposure is harder at the same time we are told our attention spans are shortening. Can the next, nationwide Civil Rights movement grip an entire culture in such an environment? Would millions march on Washington when they could just join a Facebook group?

The Hope?

My only hope is that the same revolution that multiplied the available channels (in the broad sense) has also multiplied the power and awareness of individuals and small groups, and has multiplied the diversity of ideas. If the United States is unable to produce another Dr. King, perhaps this new power, used for good, can make each of us in a very small way a Dr. King.

Cloud Computing

There is a lot of fuss around about Cloud Computing. If you want a definition, go to wikipedia. While you’re there, look up grid or cluster computing, client/server computing, desktop computing, mobile computing, web 1.0, web 2.0, and virtualization. Or just let me explain them ALL to you right now. There are only two ways to “compute” and they are as follows: (1) access the network or (2) don’t access the network. The rest is implementation details.

Social Media

Of course, no one will shut up about social media. Here’s the truth about social media: All media is social media. The only “media” that isn’t social is the media inside your head. The evolution of communication on the web has multiplied the reach and power of, well, everyone. But everything possible with “social media” was possible 100 years ago, it just took longer and used different tools. Humans Beings use technology, and media is a technology, for one of seven purposes: Finding a Mate/Reproduction, Extending/Ending Life, Food, Shelter, Clothing, Entertainment, and Communication.

Netbooks

A netbook is a small notebook. That’s it. In the 90’s we called them Sub-Notebooks, but the internet wasn’t around so we couldn’t add “Net” to something and make it cool. Unsurprisingly, computer companies realized that in the bullet-point marketing world, you can’t sell a notebook with a 9″ screen against one with a 15″ screen. So they named a new category. If a netbook is all you need, you should get one. But they’re just a computer, nothing revolutionary. They’ll probably be the first PC segment to die as computing moves away from dedicated (unspecialized) hardware.

What’d I Miss?

Those are the big ones bugging me. If you need a term demystified, let me know.

Oh Really?

No offense to Pete, but I’m of the opinion that NOT having a pay service is stupid.

Ultimately if people aren’t willing to pay money for what you’re doing, then you don’t have a business. Hell, you don’t even have customers. You have users that will fall into one of three categories, none of which make you money:

• Pay Nothings who want your service but wouldn’t pay for it no matter what. They only use you because you’re free. Fortunately in the web world, they only cost you bandwidth. In the physical world, they cost a lot more.
• Do Nothings who have a lot of time on their hands. They’re looking to burn some time and that is all. They’ll be gone shortly.
• Care Nothings who aren’t interested in what you’re doing. They’ll sign up for anything and everything free, just because it is free. Do they care about sharing photos online, uploading trail waypoints, or whatever? No. Not at all.

The Conclusion

If you aren’t creating something that people are willing to pay for, then what are you actually trying to accomplish? If you’re giving away something that isn’t worth buying, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Creating something worth buying and then giving it away doesn’t make a lot of sense either, but as part of an overall marketing and customer acquisition strategy, at least it has a shot at being sustainable.

While I was editing this brief article, another relevant article from Good Experience presented itself in Google Reader. “If you can’t get people to pay for what they love, we’re all out of business.”

Disclaimer

I know nothing about the Mac Business Unit within Microsoft, I don’t know anyone at Microsoft anymore, and have no inside information related to the topic of this post.

January 2007: Apple Announces the iPhone

What a fateful day it was. A cell phone. From Apple. That ran “Mac OS X,” whatever that meant. Then thousands of voices cried out in unison, “No Third Party Apps!” A sentence which most reasonable people knew was succeeded in Steve Jobs’ mind by the word “…yet.” [Press Release]

October 2007: Steve Jobs Announces iPhone SDK

Steve shares in an open letter that there will be an SDK, third party apps!

March 2008: SDK Released

SDK, App Store, much rejoicing. [Press Release]

July 2008: App Store is Open for Business

The biggest orgy since the iPhone hit the shelves.

February 2009: Still No Word, Excel, or PowerPoint for iPhone

It’s been nearly a year since the official release of the SDK, and even before that it was clear that the iPhone was a smash hit and likely to be the standard against which mobile handsets would be judged for a long time to come. Microsoft had plenty of warning.

I don’t know who at Microsoft has a black turtleneck phone that connects straight to Steve Jobs’ old office, but if I was that person I would have spent a lot of time on it between October 2007 and July 2008 making sure that iPhone Office Companions were some of the first apps out the door.

Instead, Office is not represented on the most influential OS in the most coveted market with the most projected growth in the technology industry. That’s crazy. People are downloading iPhone-Ocarinas and farting applications, yet there is no Microsoft Office.

Microsoft could sell 1 Million copies of a $0.99 app that did nothing but sync and view Office files with no editing capabilities at all. Throw in basic editing and charge $10, or just include a code for a free license when you buy Office for the desktop. This isn’t rocket science.

The iPhone economy, as they call it, is instead slowly developing replacements and workarounds. It won’t be long before this won’t matter because no one will need Office for the iPhone. Which is good for users, but bad for Microsoft. Considering Office 2008 for Mac wasn’t worth buying, I don’t know how they’ll be able to hang on to any customers.

21st century economies will be powered by smart growth. Not all growth is created equal. Some kinds of growth are more valuable than others. Where dumb growth is unsustainable, unfair, and brittle, smart growth is sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

-Umair Haque on HarvardBusiness.org

I’m glad someone else is talking about this. I mean, besides my paranoid, raving tirades on Porch Night en Studio (Hi guys!).

The Problem Is…

The ingrained business culture in America is based on rules for a system that hasn’t existed for a long time. We manufacture very little, outsource a lot, subsidize too much, and send (for all practical purposes) all our raw materials overseas.

As long as this makes financial sense it will happen, but that doesn’t mean it is good for our economy in the long-term. We’ll soon have “too many chiefs” as they say; if we eliminate the domestic intellectual, creative, and skilled-worker “classes” who will be left to afford college, go out to eat, and buy the things we manufacture and ship back from Taiwan? There is a limit to this growth that in my mind is approaching faster than we think.

The Solution Is…

We can change direction, restructure large segments of our economy, or realize too late that we were being short sighted and foolish. I personally think the last option is the most likely.

The Reality Is…

Culture, regulation, and “mindsets” are always years behind fundamental changes in the way we do things. Just as the average American harkens all civic and scientific knowledge back to primary education, despite intermediate progress in those fields, the average business person harkens business understanding and operations back to their “formative” years in business. Changing ingrained knowledge, understanding, and practice is very hard. This a phenomenon I call “Being a Human.”

Copyright, I lectured, was intended to provide content authors with protection of an idea for a “limited” (c.f. The Constitution) period of time to encourage creative work. That is, to ensure one could be the exclusive financial benefactor of your creation for a limited period of time, after which it would pass into public domain for the good of culture, and to force the creator to move on to other work and continue creating. Read your Lessig for detail on this.

I had also belabored the difference between creation and copy in a physical vs. digital world—read your Negroponte for more on that—which lead to a discussion of the fact that the production of a an entire album of music used to be necessary because no one would buy an cassette, album, or CD with just one track on it for a price agreeable to consumers and producers.

At which point he offered, “Why does it make sense to create an album for months or years, sell it, and then ‘Do Nothing’ for a long time.” Of course, “Do Nothing” isn’t meant literally, but the brilliance of the statement is still opening to me 48 hours later.

The album is a construct forced upon us by the old way of selling music. There’s got to be a better way. Barriers to entry are falling fast–you can make a pretty damn good song in a few hours using Garageband, and distribute it for a fraction of a minutia of the cost. Some people are already looking for a different model, but no one is doing this: What if instead of buying an album every 18 months, I could “subscribe” to artists for $20 or $50 bucks a year, which got me tons of premium content—blogs, music, videos, interviews, documentaries, whatever—all delivered digitally all the time. Every month a few songs, a few videos, some articles, etc.

If 20,000 fans who would buy a CD for $10 or $15 could convert (and who knows if they would) to 10,000 fans who would “subscribe” for $20 a year, well, that’s a more engaged (read: evangelizing) fan with more content to enjoy (and share), and an artist that can capitalize on a smaller fan base (with higher margins) and churn out more types of content (Shakespeare didn’t only write plays). And what if you had 50,000 fans? Or a million?

I only claim participatory credit for this idea. And it may be crazy—I can’t decide if this is just a “fan club” or not—but sometimes crazy ideas work.

“There has grown up in the mind of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest.”

-RA Heinlein in his short story, Life-Line, ©1939

This is why science fiction—and I mean serious science fiction, not the ridiculous Star Trek novels and such—should be read in schools.

Life-Line is published in the Expanded Universe collection. Buy it today at your local used bookstore or from Amazon.

Two Stories

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Customer approaches the service desk at a retail store with a product, clearly opened.

“I would like to return this,” Customer says.
“Do you have your receipt?” asks Employee.
“No, I don’t know where it is and when I got this home it didn’t work the way I thought it did, so I don’t really want it anymore.”
“Well, if you don’t have a receipt then we can’t take it back. And anyway it’s been opened,” says Employee.
“Well, I bought it here, I’m sure you could look it up the system.”
“I’m sorry, once a product has been opened we can’t take it back.”
“Well, can I talk to a manager?”
When she arrives, Manager listens to the exasperated customer–who has now been in the store 15 minutes–go through the story again. While she listens intently, Employee rolls his eyes, knowing that Manager will accept the merchandise and issue a store credit.

After another 5-10 minutes Employee has issued a store credit to Customer, who is relieved but frustrated the process took 30 minutes, required escalating to Manager, and retelling the story.

What’s Right With This Picture?

Customer approaches the service desk at a retail store with a product, clearly opened.

“I would like to return this,” Customer says.
“Do you have your receipt?” asks Employee.
“No, I don’t know where it is and when I got this home it didn’t work the way I thought it did, so I don’t really want it anymore.”
“OK, let me see if I can find the purchase in our system. When did you purchase it?”
“Last week,” says Customer.
“OK, and did you use a credit card?”
“No, cash.”
“OK, I won’t be able to find the record in our system then. We typically don’t take back opened merchandise without a receipt, but what I can do for you in this case is give you store credit for the amount of your purchase. Will that work?”
“Well, I would prefer the cash.”
“I would too. If you can find the receipt then I can give you cash, but without it I’ll only be able to issue store credit. Is that OK?”
“Sure.”
“OK, bear with me for just a minute while I do the paperwork and we’ll get you on your way.”

There are actually more than 2 stories here. We must count the story Customer will tell friends and family, the story that Employee will tell Coworkers, and the story of things Manager left undone to approve a simple return.

Why did the Wrong story take 30 minutes of the customer’s time? Why did it require 30 minutes of Employee’s labor plus Manager’s time?

Why did the Right story only take 5 minutes, result in a happier customer, and a less burdened Manager? More importantly, why are stories like this so rare?

More on that next time.

Not long ago, I wrote about what I call “The New Business” in a series of articles arguing, essentially, that if businesses want to “win” they need to differentiate based on something other than price, location, or local hegemony due to the flattening of barriers to entry. I said in the first article that to succeed a business needed an experience for the customer and a story for the employees. This series is about the story.

Burn Your Mission Statement

I don’t know when it was, but sometime before I reached adulthood every business became convinced it should be spending hours of executive time in a small room creating a Mission Statement. This, prima facie, may seem like a good idea, and it may have been in the distant past. But Mission Statements have become an absurdity.

Every mission statement I have ever read says something like “We want to be the premier provider of Widgets and Widget Accessories” or “We strive to fulfill our customers’ objectives.” Lofty goals, certainly, but wholly meaningless and a waste of time. These Mission Statements, admittedly abstracted–but not much–fail to guide employees in decision making and serve only to demonstrate to customers that you really have no idea how to help them.

Who Are You? What do You Want?

If a mission statement like those above is the best your business can do, then you should probably quit. If you’re the owner, president, or CEO you should close this window, turn off your computer and cash out now. A combination of the demands of New Business and the tough economic climate mean you’ve already hit, or just haven’t yet seen the iceberg. It may take years to sink that ship, but trust me, it does not pay to be the last one off the boat.

If your business has more potential than your cobwebby Mission Statement, or you’ve lost your way and are willing to sacrifice to find your compass then I’ll talk a little more about story in the next article.