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a company’s access to, and facility with, data. A trillion-dollar
Marketing historically can be parsed into three major shifts regarding how potential customers were targeted. The first era was demographic targeting. Thus, white forty-five-year-old guys living in the city, in theory, will all act, smell, and sound alike, so they must all like the same products. That was the basis of most media buying. Then, for a hot minute, it went to social targeting, in which Facebook tried to convince advertisers if two people, regardless of their demographics, “like” the same brand on Facebook, they are similar and should be grouped/targeted by those advertisers. That
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“What can you do really well that is also really hard?”
When homicide investigators arrive at a crime scene and there is a suspect—almost always the spouse—they check the suspect’s search history for suspicious Google queries (like “how to poison your husband”). I suspect we’re going to find that U.S. agencies have been mining Google to understand the intentions of more than some shopper thinking about detergent, but cells looking for fertilizer to build bombs.
Amazon has 350 million credit cards and shopper profiles on file. More than any company on earth, it knows what you like. It’s able to connect identity, shopping patterns, and behaviors. Not
Apple has a billion credit cards on file and knows the media you most enjoy and, if Apple Pay works, even more than that. Apple too is able to attach purchase data to identity. Owning such a proprietary data set is the Chilean Gold Mines or the Saudi Oil Reserves of the information age.
Amazon does an immense number of A/B test emails to see what works best, while Google knows, before anybody else, what you are intending to do. Facebook likely will know more about the arc, texture, and intersection of actions and relationships than any entity in history.
a company’s ability to attract top talent. This requires being perceived by likely job candidates as a career accelerant.
brand equity among current and potential employees is more important than their consumer equity. Why? The team with the best players attracts cheap capital, innovates, and can spark the upward spiral that pulls away from the competition.
you’re the valedictorian of your class, you have a jet pack strapped to your back in the form of intellect, grit, and emotional intelligence. But you are directionless. You are like Ironman before he learned how to fly—all over the place. A lot of momentum, a lot of thrust, but not much progress. You need to find the right platform to point you in the right direction and accelerate your career.
To be an accelerant you must have the raw material. Just as you used to build the electricity plant near the coal mine, the raw material today is top engineering, business, and liberal arts graduates.
It makes up 63 percent of all China retail commerce, and 54 percent of packages that travel via Chinese post originate from an Alibaba business.2,3 Alibaba
turning an obscure tradition known as “Singles’ Day” (November 11, or “11/11”) into the world’s largest shopping day. The company did $17.4 billion in GMV on Singles’ Day alone in 2016, of which 82 percent originated from mobile.5
Alibaba, as a conglomerate, doesn’t have a real story to tell other than one of continuous success. As we’ve learned, that’s not enough.
April 2017 Tesla surpassed Ford in market value despite selling 80,000 cars in 2016 vs. Ford’s 6.7 million.
Uber is now worth more than Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi, and thousands of families and investors
There are fewer and fewer fields in which a person reports to work with a single boss, a specific set of tasks, and the expectation that those parameters won’t change frequently or significantly. By comparison, the digital-age worker must often respond to numerous stake-holders and shift between roles throughout the day—an environment that favors the mature.
How well someone manages their own enthusiasm through those cycles is important. How people interact with one another determines the projects they work on, who will work with them, and who wants to hire them. Young people who have a strong sense of their own identity, remain poised under stress, and learn and apply what they’ve learned, do better than peers who are more easily flustered,
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.
Heraclitus
Curiosity is crucial to success. What worked yesterday is out-of-date today and forgotten tomorrow—replaced by a new tool or technique we haven’t
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?” Adherence to process, or how we’ve always done it, is the Achilles’ heel of big firms and sepsis for careers. Be the gal who comes up with practical and bat-shit crazy ideas worth discussing and trying. Play offense: for every four things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked for.
ownership. Be more obsessed with the details than anybody on your team and what needs to get done, if, when, and how. Assume nothing will happen unless you are all over everybody and everything, as it likely won’t. Be an owner, in every sense of the word—your task, your project, your business. You own it.
More than 80 percent of the world’s GDP is generated in cities,
Don’t follow your passion, follow your talent. Determine what you are good at (early), and commit to becoming great at it. You don’t have to love it, just don’t hate
