Seth Godin's Blog, page 73

Seeing and believing

It turns out that the more you watch TV, the more you believe that the world is dangerous. It turns out TV watchers believe that an astonishing 5% (!) of the population works in law enforcement. And it turns out that the more you watch TV the less optimistic you become. Cultivation theory helps us understand the enormous power that TV immersion has.

Given the overwhelming power of interaction, I'm confident that we'll discover that internet exposure, particularly to linkbait headlines, comments and invective, will also change what people believe about the world around them.

It's hopeful to imagine that we can change these outcomes by changing the inputs. Of course, the hard part is choosing to do so.

Every time I see a toddler in a stroller with an internet device in hand, I shudder.

If we want a better future, it helps to be able to see the world as it is.

            

Appearing to care

We know that your customers will put up with imperfect, but one thing that they'd like in return is for you to care.

Marketers keep making big promises, and organizations struggle to keep those promises. Sooner or later, it leads to a situation where the broken promise arrives on the customer's lap.

In that moment, what the customer wants most is someone to care.

Almost as good: an organization that consistently acts like it cares.

It's a mistake to believe that you actually have to care the way the customer cares, and that anything less means you shouldn't even try. In fact, professionals do emotional labor all the time. They present the best version of their professional self they are capable of.

When Bette Midler shows up on stage in Hello Dolly, the audience would like to believe that she's as engaged and excited as she was on opening night. And she might be. Or not. What matters is that we can't tell.

If you care, that's great. If you don't, at least right now, well, it's your job. That's the hard part.

Acting as if, doing it with effort and consistency, is what your customers need from you.

            

Bought

How much does it cost you in tolls to drive across town? In most cities, the answer is nothing.

How much does it cost you to take a bus or subway across town? In most cities, if it's available at all, quite a bit.

How did that come to be?

Mass transit is safer, cleaner and more efficient. It gives more people more access to work and amenities. A city with great mass transit works better for more people. Even those that don't use it. It's at least a useful public good as the streets are.

It's technically easy to put tolls all over a city, wastes no time, and it's economically efficient to make it incrementally free to hop on a bus and expensive to drive a car.

So why haven't we? Why, in fact, are we going the other direction?

Because left to our own devices, we go for the short-term cost savings at the expense of the long-term investment.

Because we like the status quo.

Because there's familiar profit in the car-industrial complex. The extraction industries, the manufacturers, the dealers, etc. It's an ongoing, widespread income stream. This generates cash to pay lobbyists and others to create a cultural dynamic in favor of the status quo.

It turns out that it's pretty cheap to buy outcomes that benefit a minority. And business loves a bargain.

            

On beating yourself up

Almost everyone does it. I'm not sure why.

After the fact (or even during it) all the blame, second-guessing and paralysis. We say things to ourselves that we'd never permit anyone else to say. Why?

It leaves us bruised and battered, unlikely to do our best work while we're recovering.
It hurts our knuckles.
It distracts us from the work at hand.

Perhaps there's a more humane and productive way to instill positive forward motion. I'm sure there is.

At the very least, this is a dumb hobby.

            

When in doubt, connect

That's what fast-growing, important organizations do.

Making stuff is great.

Making connections is even better.

            

The taxi or the cruise ship?

The successful cab owner knows this:

Every ride is custom

People choose a cab precisely because they can ride alone, on their own terms

Empty trips are part of the job, and it's okay, because the next ride will pay for it.

On the other hand, the person who chooses to run a cruise line knows:

Every cruise is designed by me, and people sign up precisely because I chose well

People choose a cruise ship to be with other people, to benefit from economies of scale and to be part of something

Empty trips (or worse, half-empty trips) can put the line out of business

It's pretty easy to get into the cab business. Do a few rides for friends, then list online, or join Lyft, then go full-time.

On the other hand, it's much more difficult to get into the cruise business. There's a critical mass, and the minimum number is a lot more than one customer.

Each business can be a good one if you do it at the appropriate scale.

The warning, and the purpose of the metaphor, is to realize that it's not a matter of gradually going from one to the other. Remember that running a taxi is a fine sort of business, but don't expect to turn it into a cruise ship. And vice versa.

            

The money maximization distraction

The Rolling Stones have grossed more than a billion dollars in ticket sales and endorsements. Does that mean that they're better than Beethoven, John Adams and Zoe Keating, put together? Were the Bay City Rollers better than Patti Smith?

There are CEOs who make more in a year than 1,000 of their workers. Does that mean that they're 1,000 times more important or productive or worthwhile?

Money is a simple metric, and one that captures a certain sort of information about value and scarcity. But it's wildly inaccurate when it comes to measuring many of the things that actually matter to us. It can mask the emotions and moments and contributions that we work so hard on, the people that we seek to become, the contributions that we seek to make.

Profitable is not the same as important

Popular is the not the same as worthwhile

Expensive is not the same as well-done

And yet, because it's easy to rank and compare and change, we can get seduced into believing that money is the metric that matters the most, that matters all the time. If we only use money to make our decisions about worth, we're going to get it wrong almost every time.

Until we get significantly better at matching money to contribution, we need to embrace the difficult to measure. I'll trade you a great fourth grade teacher for a foreign exchange desk currency trader any day.

            

The Peter Possibility

Dr. Laurence Peter understood the promise and peril of bureaucracy better than most. Fifty years ago, he wrote, "managers rise to the level of their incompetence." The Peter Principle states that if you do a good job, you get promoted, until you reach a job where you're incompetent, and there you stay... meaning that sooner or later, the entire organization is filled with incompetent people stuck in their slot.

Bureaucracy promises us a safe spot, and it also offers the upside that if you do a good job, you'll get chosen, picked, promoted and will move up. So, keep your head down, do what you're told and you win.

We don't live in that world any more.

And the upside is definitely more positive and a lot more scary:

You (and you alone) get to decide if you want to move "up". If you want to be promoted, have more influence, more leverage and more responsibility.

Fearful that we'll expose our incompetence, we hide. Remembering the lessons of childhood, we wait to get picked. 

But the Peter Possibility points out that we're far more competent than we imagine.

That once we pick ourselves, we have precisely what we need to do generous work.

            

Feels risky

The gulf between "risky" and "feels risky" is huge. And it's getting bigger.

It turns out that value creation lives in this gap. The things that most people won't do (because it feels risky) that are in fact not risky at all.

If your compass for forward motion involves avoiding things that feel risky, it pays to get significantly better informed about what actually is risky.

            

The management of whales

In online gaming, a whale is someone who plays far more than the typical player. It's not unusual for 2% of the player base to account for 95% of all the usage.

The same thing is true at the local gym. All the money is made on the customers who pay and never come--the folks who are at the gym or the pool for 5 hours a day use far more resources than you could possibly charge for if everyone acted this way.

The management of whales, then, is a delicate balancing act—the people who love you the most are also costing you the most. If you have too many or they take too much from the buffet, your economics are shot.

In a traditional business, one where people pay based on usage, a whale is the difference between profit and loss. That person who eats at your restaurant once a week, or goes to see Hamilton six or twelve times... This is one of the best uses of customer data. You have the chance to find people who truly are your best customers, and to treat them accordingly. A business that gets this right will outperform one that doesn't by as much as 5:1.

But there are also whales when it comes to word of mouth. Most people tell no one. A few people tell a friend or two. But some people tell everyone. And they do it with authority. With leverage. And with persistence.

A whale like this is priceless. You can't bribe someone into becoming a whale, but you can dissuade them and disappoint them merely by not caring enough to notice.

Best of all, you have a chance to become whale-worthy. To design products and services that are precisely the sort of thing that heavy users will happily use, and that powerful sneezers will happily talk about.

Actually, it's not really about the management of whales at all—it's more like seeing them, leading them and respecting them.