Seth Godin's Blog, page 41

Better and different

Digital analogs only work when they’re better and different, not when they’re almost the same.

Chat isn’t the same as chatting. Email isn’t a replacement for mail. Video conferencing isn’t just like being in a real conference…

There’s still plenty of room for digital innovations to impact our world. But they won’t simply be a replacement for what we have now. They only earn widespread engagement when they’re much better than the status quo they replace.

And the only way they can be better is when they’re different.

            

Better together

An ideal project is one where the users are better off if others are using it too.

The train to the plane in Oslo is a great example. It’s faster, easier and nicer than driving. Its existence belies the argument for selfish chaos.

The same is true for the connected phone system. We all benefit from the fact that everyone uses the same protocol to make calls or send a text.

And the CES trade show was a hugely profitable project for decades for a similar reason. One big trade show was better than 200 competing ones…

When in doubt, look for the network effect.

            

How far behind?

Should you give up?

There are people who have read far more books than you have, and you will certainly never catch up.

Your website began with lousy traffic stats, in fact, they all do. Should you even bother?

The course you’re in–you’re a few lessons behind the leaders. Time to call it quits?

Quitting merely because you’re behind is a trap, a form of hiding that feels safe, but isn’t. The math is simple: whatever you switch to because you quit is another place you’re going to be behind as well.

It’s not a race, it’s a journey. And the team that scores first doesn’t always win.

 

[PS you’re not behind on my podcast, Akimbo, but there are plenty of episodes you haven’t heard yet. Last week was about blogging, and today’s is about chocolate. Except it’s not about the chocolate.]

            

In defense of handshakes

It seems to be getting more difficult to trust that someone is going to do what they say they said they were going to do.

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“So, sue me.”

When local newspapers disappear and can’t keep a close watch on the government, it turns out that costs go up. When people need a lawyer to make an agreement and a lawyer to enforce an agreement, costs go up. When it’s not clear whether or not it’s worth the emotional and organizational risk to engage with someone, engagement doesn’t happen and costs go up.

Handshakes matter. They make our transactions more efficient and we all benefit.

But handshakes matter even more as part of our internal narrative. When you see yourself as a weasel, or as a bully, or as someone who is entitled to win at all costs, you’re poisoning your ability to be a generous creative. When you tell yourself a story of insufficiency, that you’re the sort of person who can’t possibly find the emotional or financial resources to keep your word, you make everything smaller. And when you’re always looking over your shoulder at who might be catching up to your most recent shortcut, you’re spending less time looking forward.

The bullying/shortcutting/legalistic approach to destroying the honor and trust of a handshake can lead to a downward ratchet. “Well, if they’re going to be like that, so will I…” The alternative is to reserve your best work and your best ideas and your best partnerships for people and organizations that work the way you’d like to work. A virtuous cycle, one in which the selfish people can peck at each other while you work overtime to keep your word with people who deserve it.

            

Learning from the factory/dealer divide

Car factories are a bit of a miracle. They make a complex, expensive device, and they do it close to perfectly. People love their cars, and regularly buy new ones long before they need to. It’s a largely solved engineering problem.

On the other hand, car dealerships are a disaster. No one likes them. They’re scammy, stressful and unpredictable.

The difference comes down to management vs. leadership.

Car factories are measured and managed. For a hundred years, stopwatches and spreadsheets have turned the process of making a car into a predictable, improvable system. Management is an act of authority and compliance, and in the controlled setting of a factory, it works.

Car dealers might try to measure the easy metrics of output (how many sold) but they’ve consistently failed at managing the improvised human interactions that car salespeople engage in. It turns out that the few great car dealers are great because of leadership, not management. Leadership is engaged with voluntarily, an enrolled engagement around meaning and manners, not process and motion.

Most of us don’t work in a factory. Most of us aren’t trying to solve an engineering problem. On our best days, we are leaders, or we are led by humans worthy of our best selves.

Leadership is difficult work, as far from a solvable engineering problem as we’ll encounter. It’s easier, though, if we realize that that’s what we’re doing.

When you run your dealership like a factory, you’re not going to succeed, nor are you going to please your staff. This is what creates senseless and humanity-starved bureaucracies.

The alternative:

Hire the right people, walk away from those that aren’t on the journey.

Gain enrollment.

Model behaviors.

Celebrate the right contributions.

Develop a culture, a language, a way of being on the path.

Commit to the journey.

People like us do things like this.

Raise the standards, repeat the process.

            

Stretching

There are two polar opposites: Staying still and Breaking. It's easy to visualize each end of the axis, whatever the activity.

In between is stretching.

Stretching is growth. Extending our reach. Becoming more resilient, limber and powerful. Stretching hurts a bit, and maybe leaves us just a little bit sore.

But then, tomorrow, we can stretch further than we could yesterday. Because stretching compounds.

If you're afraid of breaking, the answer isn't to stay still. No, if you're afraid of breaking, the answer is to dedicate yourself to stretching.

            

On paying for software

The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actually more efficient when more people use it.

That’s one of the reasons that people hesitate to pay for software. There isn’t a feeling of scarcity, that the store will run out if it’s free…

But of course, this overlooks the two-and-a-half essential missing factors:

Businesses need money to make the software in the first place.
Software is complicated, and it breaks. And when it does, you probably want to be the sort of user that gets focused, fast and useful help. And you want ongoing upgrades that make it better still.
It costs money to market the software, to tell you about it (that’s only .5, but still)

I like paying for my software when I’m buying it from a company that’s responsive, fast and focused. I like being the customer (as opposed to a social network, where I’m the product). I spend most of my day working with tools that weren’t even in science fiction novels twenty-five years ago, and the money I spend on software is a bargain–doing this work without it is impossible.

To name a few, I’m glad to use and pay for: Overcast, Feedblitz, Discourse, Zapier, Dropbox, Roon, WavePad, Bench, Nisus, Zoom, Slack, SuperDuper, Mailchimp, Hover, TypeExpander, Tidal, and many others. I wish I could pay for and get great support and development for Keynote. And I’m sorry I ever encountered the one or two rare exceptions in an industry that generally does amazing work with care and responsibility.

In my experience, the great software companies are run by singleminded people who bend the physics of design to their will, creating powerful leverage for those that they serve. They are craftspeople, impatient with the status quo and eager to make things better.

In many ways, software development has plateaued, and part of the reason is that people hesitate to pay for software worth paying for. I’m looking forward to the next golden age of tools that open new doors for creators and organizations.

PS here’s a ten-year old talk on this topic. And a sequel a few years later.

            

Synchronize your watches

Time zones are a recent invention. It used to be that local time was different everywhere. Each village had its own high noon.

Factories required synchronization, so that workers would all show up at the same time (which probably led to the alarm clock's invention as well).

Today, of course, two things have happened:

Everyone knows what time it is, all the time. Precisely the same time, to the second.
It matters less. More work is asynchronous. The work itself now tells you when to start working on it, as the project is passed from desk to desk, from account to account.

Work is no longer time-based. It's now project based.

Act accordingly.

            

Get off the critical path

Imagine a circle of ten kids, passing the ball from one to another.

What you do when you don't have the ball doesn't have much impact on how fast the ball moves around. But during the moments when the ball is yours, every second you spend is a second added to the route.

That route is called the critical path. It's the irreducible schedule, the sum total of all the required steps.

If you work on a team, part of your job is to know where the critical path is, and to know when you're on it. The rest of your day is devoted to helping those that are on the path or getting ready for your turn.

            

Marketing sauerkraut

The story goes that James Cook brought fermented german cabbage with him on a long voyage, an innovative way to combat scurvy.

He knew that getting his sailors to eat this strange and stinky food was going to be difficult, particularly since scurvy is a long-term problem, not something you want to try to solve after you get it.

His answer was based on recognizing the power of status roles and is widely applicable:

For the first two weeks of the journey, only the captain and the officers were allowed to eat sauerkraut.

Demand creation through status roles has a long history, apparently.