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

by Seth Godin

We’re not asking if you like it. We’re asking, “For the kind of person we seek to serve, given that time will improve many of the elements you see, what’s missing?”

Luca Dellanna reminds us that winning all the short-term games is not the best strategy for long-term success. He proposes a few ways to consider a series of games. Here are three: • Use short-term games to build long-term soft assets like trust or habits. • Play iterated games, embracing the fact that you’ll probably be back tomorrow. • Take intentional risks, but don’t expose yourself to the chance of losing your core assets.

There are infinite and finite games. Finite games are games we play to win. They have players, beginnings, and endings. Infinite games are games we play to play. A wrestling match is a finite game, and so is an election. A game of catch with your nephew is an infinite game. We don’t seek to win at catch—we just want to play it.

Networks built on information or connection abhor scarcity. They’re built to be generative instead. The kidney proposal and the 100 days idea are generative. They don’t take anything away from anyone—instead, they produce value where there hadn’t been value before. Generative approaches create value. It’s a chance to trade abundance for scarcity.

Paying it back is trading favors. Reciprocity is a natural human instinct, amplified by culture. If someone does a nice thing for you, you are inclined to do a nice thing in return. Paying it forward means offering something to someone who can do nothing in return for you.

The only way to effectively scale magic is to create a strategy where the scale is the magic.

Each person in a system will always act in their self-interest.

Culture is “people like us do things like this.”

If you want to predict how a system will respond to an input, begin by describing what’s in the self-interest of the node you’re interacting with.

The work of change-making is to help people decide that changing their actions is exactly what they want to do. Not because it’s important to us, but because it’s important to them.

Tell a story, a true story, one that holds up. And tell it only to your smallest viable audience, the tiny group that is actually listening to you, that cares and that is among the early adopters. Create tension and urgency. • Give this group a reason to share the story with others. Something that will increase their status, their affiliation with others, or increase the utility of supporting your product, service or cause. Give them the scaffolding to do this. • Help them, through use or narrative, alter the story to make it theirs.

After years of research, in 1993 Apple Computer launched a groundbreaking product called the Newton. It was a huge success, selling more than 100,000 units in its first weeks. But in just a few months, Newton turned into the most public flop in the company’s history. About fourteen years later, Apple launched the iPhone. It wasn’t particularly well reviewed, and only sold a million units in its first 74 days on sale. Hardly much of an improvement on the Newton. Since then, it has sold 2.3 billion more units, making it the most profitable consumer product of all time.

The Newton and the iPhone had very similar results at the start—launch hype is overrated. Nature is similar. After just a few weeks of development, the embryo of a human, an elephant, and a blue whale each weigh about as much as a poppy seed. The future unfolds after the launch. When we embrace time and systems, the launch takes care of itself.

The innovators in every field are seen as innovators because they confounded our expectations of genre. And many of the failures that have tried to change the culture did the same thing.

At a certain point, a person’s story about money is far more important than money itself:

Luxury isn’t more utility—it’s intentional waste: Luxury goods are items that are worth more (to some) because they cost more. The cost itself is the benefit that is being sold.

In 1952, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called “A Sound of Thunder.” In it, a time-traveling tourist to the distant past steps on a butterfly, and the entire future of the world is changed as a result.

Feedback loops can either be negative (stabilizing) or positive.

Once feedback starts running through a microphone, it gets louder and more annoying, because audio feedback leads to more audio feedback. On the other hand, if someone acts recklessly in an airport, there are countless social and practical forces at work to diminish the interruption and return things to their normal state. Negative feedback loops might be better understood as dampers.

In our current climate situation, we’re seeing what happens when the ice caps melt. When there is less ice, the amount of sunlight reflected back to space goes down, since blue/gray water absorbs more heat than the albedo effect created by white ice. More sun absorbed means more ice melting. And the feedback loop continues….

As systems become more complex, the delays magnify the complexity.

Think ahead and reason back: When we know who it’s for, what it’s for, and how we hope to get there, we can start at the end and work backward for where to begin.

Build scaffolding: Demanding that masses of people leap is rarely as effective as creating the conditions for them to simply walk on board.

Policy resistance is the self-maintaining re-centering that feedback loops enable systems to achieve.

The tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource because rational individuals believe they have no incentive to hold back.

Drift to low performance is the disappointing path of comparing our low performance to others’ even worse performance, and creating a feedback loop of lowering the bar.

The race to the bottom is not the same as drift. This is the intentional effort of lower prices, worse service, more side effects, and less care.

Escalation is an arms race, a price war, or a cycle of politicians outdoing themselves when it comes to lies, anger, or seeking shortcuts.

The rich get richer is the compounding head start that some in unrestricted markets take advantage of.

The best tactic I know for someone seeking to influence a system is simple: Elevate the useful proxies and diminish the presence of the false ones.

The agent of change often takes the form of: • Communications • Competition • Community action and regulation • The means of production and access to capital • Easing or creation of constraints • Cultural shifts When the foundation that a system is built on shifts, the system will fight back, but widespread and significant changes in these underpinnings often lead to permanent changes (and opportunities for those that see them coming). One reason that venture capitalists were so excited about the dawn of the commercial internet (and then again with artificial intelligence) is that it checked all six of these boxes at once.

Here are some change agents through the ages: • The car opened the door for fast food restaurants. • Craigslist destroyed the business model for many newspapers. Spinoffs created a new communications layer that dramatically decreased public prostitution. • MTV enabled the rise of rap music by decreasing the power of local radio stations. • Home improvement TV shows led to the popularity of the McMansion. • Birth control transformed the workforce and led to the rise of convenience foods. • 800 numbers and the credit card transformed any organization that dealt with customers. • The smart phone surfaced information about travelers and drivers, enabling Uber to transform the taxi industry. • Casual Friday started a cascade that led to a significant shift in the creation and sale of the clothes we wear every day. • The elevator permitted real estate developers to create skyscrapers and remade the idea of downtown, the same way that work from home is undoing much of that density. • Junk bonds, hedge funds, and other financial instruments led to the rise and fall of big box stores, supermarket chains, and other leveraged businesses. • AI is transforming farming. • The coming reset in the price of carbon will transform just about everything.

In order for cities to develop sufficient density, they needed skyscrapers. Before high-rise office buildings, all we had were sprawling villages. In order to have skyscrapers, we needed the elevator to be invented. But the elevator was insufficient. In the era of the telegraph, offices couldn’t possibly be many stories tall—the number of messengers running in and out with telegrams would choke any means of getting up to the higher floors. It was only the invention of the telephone that permitted knowledge workers to have an office in a skyscraper. Alexander Graham Bell changed real estate. If you look for a change agent, you can find one.

Oliver Zahn runs an insurgent tech company named Climax that uses science to make breathtakingly good cheese using only plants. It works with chefs to produce products that are delicious without apology. Mateo Kehler had this to say about Climax, “One could make the argument that this is like a fraudulent cheese.” Kehler continued, “As a cheesemaker, it’s a fraud. It looks like a cheese. It might taste like a cheese. But it’s not. It’s not connected to our historical understanding of what cheeses are.” This is the system fighting back. Other unnamed, powerful folks in the cheese industry worked behind the scenes to rescind Climax’s win in the Good Foods awards. These awards carry prestige and status in the food industry, and Climax’s blue cheese was set to win (beating out cheeses made from cows.) Why would hardworking, caring folks get so upset about a new kind of cheese? Status and affiliation. Kehler isn’t in the cow business. He’s in the business of taking a commodity raw material and turning it into a high-value food item. It shouldn’t matter to him whether the raw material is from a cow, a chickpea, or a nut. But it does. This is similar to the way the book industry acts—as if it’s in the cutting-down-trees business instead of the enterprise of bringing new ideas to people who want to pay for them.

The move to make cars superior to pedestrians began in 1913. The first recorded jaywalker shamer—“jay” was an insult, a term for a rube, a hick, someone from the country—was none other than Santa Claus. An actor stood in front of a department store in Syracuse and harangued pedestrians to get out of the way and let cars pass. Within a decade, the car industry was coming together to change the culture in cities. When citizens in the city of Cincinnati proposed a bill that would limit the top speed of cars within the city limits, local businesses banned together to defeat it. For the first time in millennia, the hierarchy of right of way was changing. Collisions that were described as grisly attacks on pedestrians by selfish drivers were now being characterized as errors by the victims.

Bringing things over in container ships allowed Walmart to sell things for less than their competition could even buy them. As they grew and their volume went up, they were able to use warehouse logistics to sell items less than thirty days after they received them—meaning that not only could they buy things for less, but they were paying their suppliers after they had sold the product, essentially getting free working capital as they grew.

Moore’s Law isn’t just a good idea, it actually is the law. For the last 60 years, the costs of computer chips keeps going down while their power goes up. If cars had the same yield curve as computer chips, you could buy a Porsche today for $50.

When the research and advisory company Gartner highlighted the potential risks of the Y2K problem 20 years ago, they had plenty of demand for their advice from large corporations. Potential risk remediation is a complicated way to say, “everything will be okay (if you listen to us).”

Philosopher Dan Dennett was wrong. He claimed that luck evens out. Alas, if you start a metaphorical marathon behind the leaders, you’re unlikely to catch up through luck. In the words of Neil Levy, “We cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck.”

Systems contain feedback loops, and the loops often reward an early lead. It’s more productive to go faster now than it is to go faster later.

This leads to Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Any strategy, scaled big enough, cannot be sustained, and it will be replaced by a new set of conditions, players, and rules.

Helicobacter pylori and Ulcers: In 1982, Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was responsible for causing most peptic ulcers, challenging the prevailing belief that ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle factors. Decades years later they won the Nobel prize.

The Alvarez Hypothesis: In 1980, father-and-son team Luis and Walter Alvarez proposed that a massive asteroid impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Decades later, it was finally widely accepted.

The smallest viable audience is most useful, but only when serving them is a seed that grows into a larger segment of the market, causing the change you seek.

Shawn Coyne explained that the author’s job is to sell the first 10,000 copies of a book, and then it’s the book’s job to sell the rest.

If the weather report says that there’s an 80% chance of sunshine on Saturday, your wedding day, does that mean it won’t rain? One way to look at a prediction of 80% sunshine is that it’s a tug of war between eight people pulling for the sun and only two people pulling for rain. Of course the sun is going to win. That’s not what’s happening. It also doesn’t mean that there’s a 100% chance it will rain 80% of the day this Saturday. If the meteorologists have done their job well, what they’re saying is that for every 100 Saturdays like this one, in this location, it’s quite likely that it will rain on 20 of them. Here’s a deck with five cards in it, one ace and four Jokers. Pick a card at random. The ace means it’s raining. Some people call this probability, which is a five-syllable way of hiding a simple idea. Probability is nothing but a report on how the deck is stacked. If we are going to choose our future, it helps to have a hint about what to expect there.

The other group, the one that successful makers of change can lean on, are individuals who understand strategy. They have domain knowledge, they can ask hard questions, and they’re eager to criticize the work (not the worker). These coaches don’t have to have played to be successful. But they need to have seen enough games and called enough plays to have domain expertise and the discernment to understand what plays to call. They’re not always right, but their feedback should be interesting. This group can ask challenging questions that cause you to refine your blueprint. Today we can train an AI to ask us these hard questions and help us see the path ahead. It doesn’t matter if it’s a person or not when we’re iterating on what’s next. It’s often the question that matters. And then what happens?

Most of the time, though, we’re looking for two axes that no one has thought to highlight before. When we find the right combination, we see that one of the four squares in the 2 x 2 grid is wide open, and we can claim it. In two famous examples, Volvo discovered that the safety/reliability quadrant was empty and filled it. And 7UP distinguished itself from Coke simply by being uncolored. 7UP is not Coke, and proud of it.

One way to find a successful positioning strategy is to steal one. Go ahead and borrow it. Shake Shack is the Starbucks of fast food places. Staples is the Home Depot of office supplies.

Tiffany’s built a position for more than 50 years. They were the famous yet exclusive, expensive but not idiosyncratic jeweler for people who wanted to send a message to friends and loved ones.