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January 22, 2018
By achieving a paradoxical goal in business—a low-cost product that sells for a premium price—Apple has become the most profitable company in history.6 The equivalent is an auto firm with the margins of Ferrari and the production volumes of Toyota. In Q4 of 2016, Apple registered twice the net profits Amazon has produced, in total, since its founding twenty-three years ago.7,8,9 Apple’s cash on hand is nearly the GDP of Denmark.10,11
As America barreled toward midcentury, the car and refrigerator meant we could drive farther to get more stuff we could store safely longer.
On Amazon, Bezos realized, every page can be a store and every customer a salesperson. And the company could grow so fast that there wouldn’t be any corners left for competitors to carve out a niche.
Amazon appeals to our hunter-gatherer instinct to collect more stuff with minimum effort.
Whom does this latest Amazon maneuver put at risk? The 3.4 million Americans (2.6 percent of the U.S. workforce) employed as cashiers.38 That’s a lot of workers—close to the number of primary and secondary school teachers in the United States.39 As retailers are coping with the
In the short term, Go and Echo suggest that the company is headed toward zero-click ordering across its operations.
Most successful VC-backed tech companies in the nineties raised less than $50 million before showing a return to investors. By comparison, Amazon raised $2.1 billion in investors’ money before the company (sort of) broke even.44 As the company has shown, Amazon can launch a phone, invest tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars on development and marketing, have it fail within the first thirty days,
“Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
In 2004, 47 percent of affluent consumers could name a favorite retail brand; six years later that number dropped to 28 percent.82
Each year, Google and brand.coms lose product search volume to Amazon (6 to 12 percent for retailers for 2015 to 2016). Conventional thinking is that consumers are researching on brand sites, then going to Amazon to buy. In reality, 55 percent of product searches start on Amazon (vs. 28 percent on search engines such as Google).
“Attractive things work better,” says Don Norman, vice president of advanced technology at Apple from 1993 to 1998. “When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least it feels like it does.”24
Apple’s stores sell nearly $5,000 per square foot.
Male lions have a life expectancy of 10–14 years in the wild. However, they live twenty years or more in captivity.41 Why? Because, in captivity, they aren’t constantly challenged by other males. Males in the wild usually die of injuries from fights protecting or challenging the throne. Very few die of old age.
What we learn on the social network, and especially on Face-book’s subsidiary Instagram, creates ideas and desires.
Facebook gestates intent better than any promotion or advertising channel. Once in pursuit, we go to Google or Amazon to see where to get it. Thus Facebook is higher up the funnel than Google. It suggests the “what,” while Google supplies the “how” and Amazon the “when” you will have it.
The thievery gave rise to a multibillion-dollar industry: consulting. The United States has the best consulting firms in the world—theft is in our DNA.
That’s world-class “borrowing.” Facebook built its foundation on a second lie, repeated thousands of times in early meetings between Facebook’s army of sales reps and the world’s largest consumer brands: “Build big communities and you will own them.”
Nike paid Facebook to build its community, but now less than 2 percent of Nike’s posts reach that community—unless, that is, they advertise on Facebook.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, all successful businesses appeal to one of three areas of the body—the brain, the heart, or the genitals.
We feel better when we love, nurture, and care for others. We also live longer.
It’s Darwinian—the species needs caregivers to skirt extinction.
People who are comfortable taking direction and giving it, and who understand their role in a group, do better than their peers when lines of authority get murky and organizational structures are fluid.
Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not dreading the next change, but asking, “What if we did it this way?”
Play offense: for every four things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked for.
Together the horsemen employ about 418,000 employees—the population of Minneapolis.5 If you combine the value of the Four Horsemen’s public shares of stock, it comes to $2.3 trillion.6 That means our 2.0 version of Minneapolis contains nearly as much wealth as the gross domestic product of France, a developed nation of 67 million citizens.7 This affluent city will thrive while all the rest of Minnesota scrounges for investment, opportunity, and jobs.
