Seth Godin's Blog, page 45

The triumph of everyday design

Luxury goods used to be better. Better than the alternatives.

The best-made clothing, the best saddle, the most reliable luggage. The top of the market was the place people who cared needed to go to buy something that had the highest performance.

Today, though, a Toyota is a better car than a Bentley. More efficient, more reliable. The Vertus phone was a joke, and no one needs a $200 mouse when a $9 one is faster and easier to use.

I spent some time at a high-end hotel on a recent gig. The light switches were complicated and didn't work quite right. The door handle was awkward. The fancy faucets sprayed water on whoever was standing in front of the sink. All expensive, none of it very well-designed.

As materials have gotten cheaper and easier to find, it's design that matters. And the market is demanding better design--which is easy to copy and easy to improve.

Expensive is not the relevant metric, utility is. 

            

"You were right all along"

There's a hierarchy in the adoption of new techniques and approaches, particularly in the b2b setting:

You were right all along: The thing you were waiting for is here.
All of the cool kids are using this now: Take a look at the folks who are already on board. That topic you didn't care about so much--you need to care about it now.
Well, you were wrong, but don't worry about it, here's some cover: I know you said that this would never work, but it's working. The good news is that you can talk about how your open-mindedness lets you leap forward now.

It's almost impossible to get someone to try something new today if they also have to admit that they were wrong yesterday.

            

The problem with forced rankings

What's the best college in the US?

What about the best car?

Best stereo speakers? Best pizza?

The answer is always the same: It depends.

People hate that. "It depends" puts you on the hook, requires you to have priorities and a point of view. 

A forced ranking is freeing. It tells you exactly what to expect, and if things don't work out, well, blame the system. A forced ranking brings status along with it, because, apparently, if you care enough or are rich enough to have the best, then you must be the best.

When we compress 100 variables into just one linear measure, we add enormous amounts of editorial tweaking and lose a ton of nuance. If you want to study aeronautical engineering, Harvard isn't going to be a good choice. If you're gluten-free or diabetic, that pizza place might not work out so well for you. And if your definition of a good car includes safety, fuel efficiency or the ability to move your family around, that McLaren isn't going to make you happy.

Forced rankings abandon multiple variables, and they magnify differences that aren't statistically significant. "Well, there has to be one winner," they say, but of course, this isn't true. It's not a linear race, and the very concept of a single winner is forced.

When the US News college list started to get traction, plenty of college presidents spoke out in opposition. Over time, though, they discovered that being well ranked was profitable, and in an industry that touches billions of dollars a year, status leads to money and money leads to more status... Today, many colleges are intentionally gaming the system by changing what they originally stood for simply to move up. 

High rankings do more than distort the behavior of those that seek to move up. High rankings attract the sort of people who don't want to discover their own 'best'. Who want to be around others that care about high rankings. Who will run to the next high rank the moment the world changes. And those that are attracted to the winner of a forced ranking change the very tenor of the place they chose. So now, that restaurant that used to be special is merely crowded. Now the company that only keeps its top performers is a horrible place to work.

The biggest problem with a forced ranking is that it's forced.

            

Tactics without strategy is a scrum

When your timeline is an hour or a day, it's easy to get in the tactical groove.

But repeat that hour after hour, day after day, and all you're making is a mess.

This is bureaucracy run amok. This is busy-ness, not effectiveness.

What's the long-term plan? What builds on what? How do you build assets and leverage instead of merely keeping busy?

And how can you tell if it's working?

            

Easier said than done

But at least you said it.

It's a mistake to hesitate on the saying part. Because if you don't say it, it's unlikely to get done.

Dreams, goals and projects don't require a likelihood of success merely to be discussed.

            

Monopoly is the goal, monopoly is the problem

Every public company seeks, at some level, to be a monopoly, an organization with enough market power to dictate pricing, profits and the future of the market.

And monopoly is also a critical failure of capitalism. When monopoly occurs, when the customer no longer has a choice, prices go up, innovation goes down and mostly, consumers have no voice.

A key role of government is to create an environment where monopolies don't happen--and when they do, to intervene and eliminate them.

Choice is the key word in making markets work. No choice, no market.

            

Putting a value on a story

Walk through the diamond district in Manhattan and in the course of one block, at least a dozen men will stop you and ask if you're hoping to sell a diamond ring.

A few blocks away, Tiffany will happily sell you a diamond ring.

Buy a $7,000 ring at Tiffany's and walk over to one of these guys and you'll be lucky to get $1,000 for your new ring.

That $6,000 is what you paid for the story.

It's the cost of the box, the lighting, the salespeople, the architecture and most of all, the special feeling.

Do a blind taste test. In one glass, wine from a $10 bottle. In the other, wine from a $200 bottle. The untasted difference between the two is what you paid for the story.

The list goes on and on.

Just about everything we buy comes with a story included.

And yet, most creators, sellers and marketers don't invest enough, don't take enough care, and don't persist enough in making sure the story is worth what you paid for it.

            

Considering the buyout

Is it ever okay to sell the rights to your work?

Milton Glaser was paid about $2,000 in expenses to create the I Love NY logo, one of the iconic marketing images of its decade. He later said, "I was very happy to do it. I was very happy about the consequences.”

Carolyn Davidson originally made $35 for designing the swoosh that Nike made famous.

Neither was paid enough, certainly.

It's tempting to reject the idea of a creative buyout on principle. After all, you're getting paid a relatively small amount for work that could end up in front of a billion people.

But there's a difference between art and illustration. Between commotion and expression.

Illustration has a client. The client may have an idea or a specific need. And the client is taking on all of the risk, doing all of the promotion. Of course, if it doesn't become a home run, the client isn't entitled to a refund. 

The artist, on the other hand, works for the muse. She's responsible for the execution, sure, but also the content, the market fit and the magic of what happens next. The artist is free to wander, and free to own the consequences.

Illustration is a bit like copywriting, corporate music, industrial photography--anything where you're doing your work for commerce, for a client, under direction.

As Milton Glaser has shown, being associated with dramatic success as an illustrator opens the door to even more success. It can fuel your art and create opportunities for higher leverage in your illustration work as well. Illustration can pay some bills at the same time it chips away at your obscurity problem.

When you're willing to do art, do art. Do it wholeheartedly. But the world needs illustrators too, and if it's a useful tool for you, embrace it.

            

Kurtosis is not a disease (but getting it wrong is painful)

The mass producers of the world (from ketchup to school) tried to persuade us that by grouping everyone into a tight bundle of normal, everything would become more efficient and we'd all do better. In stats, this is called leptokurtosis.

The race for leptokurtosis spread like wildfire. It implies control and reliability and compatibility. It insists that people who don't eat normal food are a pain in the neck, that folks who are differently abled and need an accommodation are somehow costing the rest of us something.

You can have any color car you want as long as it's black, and if you can't reach the pedals or read the fine print, well, maybe you shouldn't be driving.

What we've discovered, though, is that a platykurtic distribution is actually more efficient, more powerful and more fair.

Platykurtic? Yes, with wide, long tails. Like a platypus. Everyone welcome. Designed for humans, not a machine.

When we build an adjustable seat, when we make things that work for more and more people, we don't spend more. We get more.

            

Bigger to feel safer

Creative institutions get bigger so that they can avoid doing things that feel risky.

They may rationalize this as leverage, as creating more impact. But it's a coin with two sides, and the other side is that they do proportionally more things that are reliable and fewer things that feel like they might fail.

In other words, hiring more people makes their useful creative productivity go down.

This is not the way it works in a factory. When Henry Ford hired more people for the assembly line, productivity went up. Things got more efficient. More lines, more plants, more hands led to more productivity. The natural scale of the enterprise was large indeed.

But a creative studio, a marketing team, architects, strategists, programmers, writers, editors, city planners, teachers--the natural scale of the enterprise is smaller than you think.

This is a new law of organizations, and it's not well understood.

We hire more people to make it feel safer. To paper over the cracks, to please more people, to increase stability.

None of these things are why the creative institution exists.

While the bureaucracy may benefit from more scale, the work doesn't.