Seth Godin's Blog, page 254

Jumping the line vs. opening the door

Every morning, the line of cars waiting to get onto the Hutchinson River Parkway exceeds 40. Of course, you don't have to patiently wait, you can drive down the center lane, passing all the civilized suckers and then, at the last moment, cut over.

Drivers hate this, and for good reason. The road is narrow, and your aggressive act didn't help anyone but you. You slowed down the cars in the lane behind you, and your selfish behavior merely made 40 other people wait.

This is a different act than the contribution someone makes when she sees that everyone is patiently waiting to enter a building through a single door. She walks past everyone and opens a second door. Now, with two doors open, things start moving again and she's certainly earned her place at the front of that second entrance.

Too often, we're persuaded that initiative and innovation and bypassing the status quo is some sort of line jumping, a selfish gaming of the zero sum game. Most of the time it's not. In fact, what you do when you solve an interesting problem is that you open a new door. Not only is that okay, I think it's actually a moral act.

Don't wait your turn if waiting your turn is leaving doors unopened.

Initiators #1 [PTB]

To celebrate the launch of Poke the Box , I'm going to profile a dozen people who have, in various ways, made the decision to lead, to poke, to initiate. Starting things is a scarce resource, the fuel we need to change things for the better.

Let's kick it off with Sasha Dichter, Director of Business Development at the Acumen Fund. He doesn't run a company, he has a boss, and he works for a non-profit. Certainly there's not a lot of room for initiative and innovation in a setting like this.

Except there is. Sasha has one of the most influential non-profit blogs online, something he started on his own. He has written provocative manifestos and recently launched a national holiday.

It's so easy to get hung up on reacting to incoming, on working through a checklist and on imagining what the boss wants you to do next. It's far more productive, I think, to decide where you want to go and then go there. And the power and low-price of online tools makes that easier than ever.

The key difference between initiators and everyone else is the simple idea of posture. What do you say to yourself in between assignments? What do you do when you see something that needs doing?

Sasha asks himself (not his boss), "what's next?" And that's the shift. You look at a world of opportunities and you pick one. Initiative is taken, it's not given.

Who will say go?

Here's a little-spoken truth learned via crowdsourcing:

Most people don't believe they are capable of initiative.

Initiating a project, a blog, a wikipedia article, a family journey. Initiating something even when you're not putatitively in charge.

At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback or merely criticizing.

So finding people to fix your typos is easy.

A few people are vandals, happy to anonymously attack or add graffiti or useless noise.

If your project depends on individuals to step up and say, "This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe," then you need to expect that most people will see that offer and decline to take it.

Most of the edits on Wikipedia are tiny. Most of the tweets among the billions that go by are reactions or possibly responses, not initiatives. Q&A sites flourish because everyone knows how to ask a question, and many feel empowered to answer it, if it's specific enough. Little tiny steps, not intellectual leaps or risks.

I have a controversial belief about this: I don't think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it's possible and acceptable for you to do it. We've only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

There's a huge shortage... a shortage of people who will say go.

Today we're shipping my new book Poke the Box. Writing a book isn't that difficult for me (I've done it before), and it would have been easy to keep publishing books the traditional way, the way it's supposed to be done. Instead, I took the opportunity to start a new publishing company, to reinvent a lot of what we expect when we think of when we consider publishing a book. I took my own advice.

I hope you'll check it out.

Go!

The simple two-step process

Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more.

Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship.

The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren't open enough, aren't willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate.

Simple doesn't always mean easy.

Wonder and anger

It's hard to imagine two emotions more different from one another.

And yet one can easily replace the other. A sense of wonder and grinding anger can't co-exist.

Great innovations, powerful interactions and real art are often produced by someone in a state of wonder. Looking around with stars in your eyes and amazement at the tools that are available to you can inspire generosity and creativity and connection.

Anger, on the other hand, merely makes us smaller.

A linchpin hierarchy

Do exactly what the boss says.

Ask the boss hard questions.

Tell the boss what your best choice among the available options is. Insist.

Have co-workers and bosses ask you hard questions.

Invent a whole new way to do things, something that wasn't on the list.

Push and encourage and lead your co-workers to do ever better work.

Insist that they push and encourage you.

30%, the long tail and a future of serialized content

The 1960s and 70s were the golden age of magazines. Why?

Lots of people wanted to read them

The newsstand could only hold a few of them (barrier to entry permits some to win)

The winners had no trouble selling ads because they had motivated readers, in quantity

The cost of making one more edition of the magazine was relatively low

Enter tablets. To some, it feels like the dawn of a new golden age. People page through apps like Wired and gasp at the pretty pictures and cool features. Surely, we're going to recreate that moment.

Here's the problem, and here's how Apple is making it much worse:

The newsstand is infinite. That means that far more titles will have far fewer subscribers. There are more than 60,000 apps on the newsstand. Hard to be in the short head when the long tail is so long...

plus, the cost of each issue is far higher, because it costs a lot more to pay a videographer, a video editor, a programmer, etc. than it does to pay John Updike to write 4,000 words...

plus, advertisers are harder to come by, because the number of readers is always going to be lower than it was back then, and the ads are easier to skip.

Of course, the good news is that the publisher doesn't have to pay for paper, so the profit on each subscriber ought to be way higher. Except...

Except Apple has announced that they want to tax each subscription made via the iPad at 30%. Yes, it's a tax, because what it does is dramatically decrease the incremental revenue from each subscriber. An intelligent publisher only has two choices: raise the price (punishing the reader and further cutting down readership) or make it free and hope for mass (see my point above about the infinite newsstand). When you make it free, it's all about the ads, and if you don't reach tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers, you'll fail.

In a rare glitch, John Gruber got Apple's decision about the 30% subscription task completely wrong. By his logic, Apple would have been just as good for its users if the tax was 60%.

For content to be fabulous, for tablets to be more than game platforms, folks like Apple need to do two things:

Reward creators instead of taxing them.

Create promotional channels so that curated great stuff (not merely things from big companies) has a chance to reach a mass audience.

The web has been a hotbed of siloed content, of deep dives for small audiences. The large scale stuff, though, has tended to be mostly about gossip and other quick reads that's cheap to produce. Tablets offer a new chance to create content worth paying for. Paving the way for that to happen is a smart move for anyone who cares about the audience and the devices.

Making a straighter ruler

It's not easy. It's hard to get straighter than straight.

Over time, processes that seek to decrease entropy and create order are valued, but improving them gets more difficult as well. If you're seeking to make the organized more organized, it's a tough row to hoe.

Far easier and more productive to create productive chaos, to interrupt, re-create, produce, invent and redefine.

An atomic theory of business size

The magic of the periodic table is that every atom is one thing or another--there isn't a stable element that's sort of oxygen and sort of nitrogen. If there were, there would be millions of elements, not a few hundred.

That's because electrons are (more or less) either here or there. The quantum levels ensure that there are no weird hybrids.

A business follows a similar model. A local mom and pop store is just the right size for mom and for pop. The rent is low enough for the two of them to cover it. It's stable. They can't afford a $200,000 a year CFO. It wouldn't be a stable situation.

This is backwards but here you go: businesses that exist exist because the marketplace allows them to function at the right size. There were a lot of bowling alleys in the 1960s because the number of people you needed to run one plus the rent was just covered by the revenue you could expect. There was a right size, one that people were willing to take on and run.

The next level up from Mom and Pop feels different. Different furnishings, different rent, different payroll. It's not a little bigger, it's a whole quantum level different. And then down the street is the chain store, the one with 40 outlets and regional vice presidents and regional newspaper ads. Those things naturally go together, the scale is right.

Rightsizing your business is one of the most important decisions you can make. Just because you're thriving at one scale doesn't mean that a little more effort or a little more investment magically take you to the next. They probably don't.

Want to sell your popular donuts at Whole Foods? That's a quantum leap, not an incremental step.

Want your auction software company to become a public behemoth? It requires a leap of size and commitment, not a gradual creep.

Want to go from freelance work as a programmer to running a business like Fog Creek Software? Totally different list of requirements.

This is actually a good thing. It's good because rightsizing allows you to be profitable and live as a human. Those chasms in between are where people fall down.

One of the side effects of the internet revolution is that several new stable business sizes appeared. Groupon can do a billion dollars in revenue nationwide with far, far fewer employees than it took Target to hit the same level. A solo author can reach more people and generate more impact than she ever could have a dozen years ago.

These new sizes don't mean that the rules of quantum scale have gone away, though. That popular self-published author might be able to successfully employ six people, but there's no way she magically scales to sixty without something else changing. Several times I've run businesses that the market liked but couldn't find the right scale... adding more people didn't add a significant enough amount of revenue, and fewer people would have cost us our customer base. Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean that there's a scale that works.

When in pain, consider your scale. When you're too big or too small for the revenue or the impact you seek, you'll feel it in your bones. Leap.

A flip side: the asymmetrical gift

Yesterday I bummed you out with a riff about favors becoming impossible to fulfill. Worth a thought: the alternative, the good news that comes with the bad, is the massive asymmetric gift.

A gift is not a favor, because no recompense is implied or expected. A gift is just from me to you, that's it.

The internet makes it easy to give gifts to large numbers of people at very very low cost. Editing a wikipedia article, for example, is a gift for the ages, one that might be seen by a million people over three years.

This leads to a new clause in the social contract. In this environment, we expect that civilized participants will give. Just because. Because they can. Because the gift makes all of it work better.

While mass favors have to fade (too easy to ask for, too unfair at scale), mass gifts show up to change the equation. Gifts are easy to scale, now, the more generous, the better. For all of us.