Hey you! You’re a bright one. You’ve got a real spark, I think you’re ready for some real high-level thinking. You are now a strategist!
That’s right! No more toiling away in the Dickensian world of Word and Excel, you are now strictly in PowerPoint. You have transcended the Samsara of everyday business life and achieved the Nirvana of full strategic consciousness. Great. Now what do you do?
All too often, “strategy” is a value judgement rather than a practice. Nobody is a screw-up anymore, merely “not strategic.” One becomes “strategic” by getting promoted, not necessarily through acquiring new skills. So what should a strategist do? Well, there’s an answer to that. As Wittgenstein would say, it’s time to let the fly out of the bottle.
While the rest of the economy is sputtering, social commerce is booming. Sites like GroupOn and livingsocial are taking the world by storm.
On the surface, it looks like the early days of the Web, when sites selling everything from groceries to pet food were sprouting up everywhere.
Most failed, but Amazon boomed. It was a “winner take all” game. So it would be logical to assume that social commerce will go the same way. A wide and vibrant field, an all out race and then one man left standing.
However, look beneath the surface and it becomes clear that it will most likely be very different this time. We are much more likely to see a situation similar to online media; a variety of models competing in a fragmented, vibrant market.
What will the digital world look like in ten years? The trends are already clear.
Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path. The explosion in the volume of information and number of devices will persist. Our data will be linked and most likely be processed in qubits rather than bits.
However, trends tell us very little. It’s discontinuities that drive history. Everything seems fine and then boom! E-commerce comes along, then search engines, social media, smart phones and on and on. Much like the flood that set Noah on his journey, such events, although driven by trends, take us in completely new directions and create new orders.
Back in the 1880’s, Frederick Winslow Taylor was able to make dramatic gains in efficiency by timing workers performing rote tasks. His efforts spawned the idea and practice of scientific management.
Alas, these days routine jobs, even white collar ones such as bookkeeping, legal research and basic medical diagnoses are increasingly being automated by computer. Others fall prey to globalization and are outsourced.
So to compete in today’s marketplace, you have to be able to create. That’s much different than just working faster or harder or longer. The good news is that, while we can’t all be a Picasso or a Mozart, there are some simple principles we can follow that will enhance our ability originate ideas that are truly new and important.
It was two years ago this week that I launched Digital Tonto on a whim. I’ve been amazed and gratified by the support you have given me.
In the past year, more than 80,000 of you have visited the site over 125,000 times. You have tweeted it, linked to it and put it on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. I couldn’t be more grateful. But enough about you, let’s talk about me.
Just like last year, I’m listing some of my very favorite posts from the past 12 months. Some were popular, some were not, but all of them, along with your responses – some kind, some critical – enriched me in some way. I’m hard at work developing content for Digital Tonto’s third year and will do my best to earn your continued support. Enjoy!
I’m LinkedIn. I’ve got friends on Facebook. I tweet. Yo, I got stooopid Klout! Look at me! I’m connected!
And so are you and lots of other things, like ecosystems, molecules, our bodies’ metabolisms, the list goes on. Quantum physicists believe that all matter and energy is linked in strange ways and create mind-numbing field equations to explain how.
We in the marketing world often fall into the trap of thinking about social networks purely in terms of social media and miss the big picture. Network science is explaining large swaths of mysterious phenomena that have eluded us for decades, even centuries. That’s good news for marketers. These new insights are about to revolutionize our field.
The barbarians are at the gate! We are on an burning platform in the ocean! This is no time for incrementalism, we need radical change!
We hear this stuff a lot. It’s become the Henny Youngman one-liner for the digital age. A rousing call for sound and fury… signifying nothing.
The truth is that radical change rarely works. It is neither strategy nor action, but rather cry of desperation. It’s a sign that someone who hasn’t been thinking seriously now yearns to be taken seriously. Most of all, it’s an indication that the worst is still yet to come. Here’s why and what you can do about it.
The world is full of ideas, but very few good ones. As an old saying goes, “ideas are like assholes, everybody’s got one and they’re usually full of shit.” They are, however, important.
Great ones can change the world. Ideas, if we nurture them, can become dreams, transform the mundane into the sublime and poverty into prosperity. Life would be exceedingly boring without ideas.
Yet it’s not enough to have a a flash of insight or a brainstorm. A worthy idea needs to be nurtured and developed, rethought and reworked, often thrown away and picked back up again. There’s a substantive difference between a passing fancy and groundbreaking concept. It is our approach to ideas that makes that difference.
When I was a kid, my parents chided me for not knowing the value of a dollar. To them, that was a sign that I was spoiled and unable to understand or accept responsibility. This, they told me, was very, very bad.
Okay guys, I’ll cop to all the other misbehavior, but not this one. I still don’t know the true value of a dollar and don’t think anyone else does either.
In fact, the more I’ve look into it, the more elusive value is as a concept. Certainly, we can see prices fluctuate by the minute on Wall Street, but it goes much deeper than that. We’ve evolved for survival, not optimization and that has left our emotional circuitry with some funny glitches when it comes to dealing with modern society.
Entrepreneurs are a special breed. They’re fearless, full of ideas and energy, fun and inspiring to work with.
Unfortunately, they often self destruct and most have trouble making the transition from start-up to serious enterprise. Investors and employees are alienated, companies falter and nobody ends up happy.
Some people think that it’s just the nature of the beast, that at some point a company founder should step down and let “adult supervision” take over. I disagree. Entrepreneurs represent the heart and soul of the companies that they create and when they leave, something important is forever lost. There are, however, some things they need to know.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
