This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

If we know what people are looking for, it’s easier to find it. Here are a few, many of which are rooted in Western commercial culture. • Reassurance: This is the dominant one. The system wants what the system wants. And one thing it wants is to persist. If there’s a way to spend time and money to ensure that everything will remain okay, to avoid the current emergency, that action relieves tension. • Faster: The race for productivity continues unabated, and faster-moving ideas, devices, and processes often gain traction, usually by people who like moving faster, which means the adoption is faster as well. • More connected: Since 1850, we’ve been wiring the world into a network. Systems are the original networks, and with increasing rapidity, systems are adopting approaches that further enmesh the nodes. • More convenient: Tim Wu has pointed out that the wealthy consumer will trade almost anything for convenience. Dishwashers and one-click shopping are all part of the same spectrum. • Cheaper: If all other things are equal (though they rarely are), people pick the cheap one.