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HouseKeeping Time

Nilofer Merchant — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 22:23:05 +0000

Did you know that Google intends to shut down access to Feedburner’s APIs on October 20? A banner note on the Google Developers Feedburner API page makes that intent clear, so it was time for us to update our tools over at nilofermerchant.com. This means you have action items.

My web advisor, Todd Lohenry of e1evation, and I were already thinking about doing a major site upgrade to get ready for the book release. So here we are.

What that means for you is this:

1. Email Subscribers do Nothing. You lucky dogs. We’ve moved everything to Mailchimp for you. So if you had signed up for “newsletter” option, you’re going to keep getting it. However, in the transition, Todd and I messed something up. We managed to miss getting you two major posts. One sharing my TEDtalk from TEDGlobal. The other, entitled “Traditional Strategy is Dead. Welcome to the #SocialEra” announces the new book and shares an infographic that I absolutely love and hope you will get a chuckle out of.

2. RSS feed readers will want to redirect your feedreader to http://nilofermerchant.com/feed as soon the old one will no longer work. You have a month.And then the other feedburner goes bye, bye. So act now.

And for those of you that found this post but don’t already subscribe to the Yes & Know blog, it’s not too late. Really.

Subscribe here.

Okay, back to the regular program. Enjoy your weekend.

The post HouseKeeping Time appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

Go Where No One Else Is

Nilofer Merchant — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:31:03 +0000

Thedailybeast

Wed, Jan 11 2012 20:47:57
Whitney Johnson, a partner at Clayton Christensen’s investment firm wrote a powerful piece in 2011 uniquely captured why pursuing a disruptive course is the best investment you can make.
“

Throw out the performance metrics you’ve always relied on
“A disruptive innovation must measure different attributes of performance than those in your current value networks,” writes Christensen. Nearly everyone hits a point in their life where they examine their trajectory and consider a pivot. We typically label this mid-life crisis, but isn’t it more often a re-thinking as to which performance attributes matter? Perhaps earlier in your career the metric was money or fame, but now you want more autonomy, flexibility, authority, or to make a positive dent in the world. These require different metrics of success. If, for example, after leaving Wall Street in 2005, I had continued to gauge my success based on money earned, I was nothing short of a failure. But if I measured success by the progress I made during the ensuing years — learning, developing, building something, doing good — I could judge my performance as successful. It’s still not easy to measure, but as social media expert Liz Strauss said, “It’s not possible for the world to hold a meeting to decide your value. That decision is all yours.”

Your odds of success will improve when you pursue a disruptive course
What Christensen found in his analysis of the disk drive industry (which is discussed in The Innovator’s Dilemma, and is foundational to our investing), is that firms seeking growth via new markets are 6x more likely to succeed than firms seeking growth by entering established markets, and the revenue opportunity is 20x greater. It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? When we start in a place where no one else wants to play, where the scope of the opportunity appears limited, the odds of success actually improve.

Disrupt Yourself – Whitney Johnson – …

Wed, Jan 04 2012 15:36:33
One reason people avoiding doing this strategy of distinction is because they believe there can only be 1 winner in any market but as this article documents, there are many ways to be a winner. But no one wins by being #2 in a space. This applies to companies and to individuals, find your own point of distinction — something only YOU can do — and then DO It to it’s fullest edge.

If you don’t know what that is, you’re not doing your job.
“

In war, there can be only one winner. Not so in business, where companies like WalMart and Target can thrive and co-exist, each offering a different kind of value to its customers. In sports, there is just one contest with one set of rules. Not so in business, which is more complex and open-ended. Within an industry, there can be multiple contests, not just one, based on which needs are to be served. McDonald’s is a winner in fast food, specifically fast burgers. But In-N-Out Burger thrives on slow burgers. Its customers are happy to wait ten minutes or more (an eternity by McDonald’s stopwatch) for non-processed, fresh burgers cooked to order.

Here’s the problem: When rivals all pursue the “one best way” to compete, they find themselves on a collision course, trapped in a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. Everyone in the industry follows the same advice. Companies benchmark each other’s practices and products. Customers, lacking meaningful choice, buy on price alone. Profitability deteriorates.

Stop Competing to Be the Best – Joan …

Fri, Dec 23 2011 18:31:19
It will feel lonely,
perhaps, to go where others are not and you might look around and
wonder if you are on the right path. But every innovator / change agent /
kick-ass person who delivered value is also a person who marked their
own way. We know it. Now we need to do it.
Facing into this reality is ridiculously hard. Most of us don’t have to ever get really clear on anything. Fuzzy is enough most of the time. But when we get clear and decide to find that path that we need to find, then we get the rewards of not only knowing what we care about (key) but then having other people see that. We get to be a market of 1. So, go Your Own Way. (And now, look what has happened… I’ve gotta go find me some Fleetwood Mac to listen to.)

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Fearless Cultures Embrace Disruption

Nilofer Merchant — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:28:35 +0000

“

From classrooms arranged in rows of seats to tenured professors, from the assembly line to the way we promote executives, we have been trained to expect an orderly life. Yet the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap.

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pio…

Mon, Jan 09 2012 06:08:15
“

Any business that ignores these transformations does so at its own peril. Despite recession, currency crises, and tremors of financial instability, the pace of disruption is roaring ahead. The frictionless spread of information and the expansion of personal, corporate, and global networks have plenty of room to run. And here’s the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast–the road map and model that will define the next era–no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pio…

Mon, Jan 09 2012 08:49:48
“

Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we’ve learned and relying on what’s worked before. It’s also about as useful as an appendix right now. When times seem uncertain, we instinctively become more conservative; we look to the past, to times that seem simpler, and we have the urge to re-create them. This impulse is as true for businesses as for people. But when the past has been blown away by new technology, by the ubiquitous and always-on global hypernetwork, beloved past practices may well be useless.

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pio…

Mon, Jan 09 2012 07:07:09
Coney Island Fun Nostalgia

Far & Away

Sun, Jan 08 2012 19:00:00
“

“Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems–when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pio…

Mon, Jan 09 2012 06:08:15
“

This strategy also had a practical side, of course. There are many fewer universals than particulars, and you can often figure out the particulars if you know the universals: If you know the universal theorems that explain the orbits of planets, you can figure out where Mars will be in the sky on any particular day on Earth. Aiming at universals is a simplifying tactic within our broader traditional strategy for dealing with a world that is too big to know by reducing knowledge to what our brains and our technology enable us to deal with.

To Know, but Not Understand: David We…

Thu, Jan 05 2012 12:42:08
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The pragmatic course is not to hide from the change, but to approach it head-on. Thurston offers this vision: “Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they’re used to speed. A world that slows down if there are fewer options–that’s old thinking and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal.”

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pio…

Mon, Jan 09 2012 09:15:00

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Must-Read Weekend Reading

Nilofer Merchant — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:33:36 +0000

[I’ve been developing a Harvard Magazine article on the demise of 800 lb gorillas, and the new rules played by those that replace them, so not as much writing this week on Yes & Know. But I have still been reading a bit, and these are some gems to share.]

The Global Mind

In sharing these messages of connectedness and interdependence, I believe there will be a positive ripple effect—sparks that will help turn what we’re talking about into action. It’s all about connection—connecting ideas, data, and cultures from millions of brains into a global thinking structure with infinite possibilities. Every text, hyperlink, and Tweet is like a neural synapse firing out to everyone we’re connected to. And with each connection, we get a surge of oxytocin, as if the Internet were creating a global network for oxytocin to flow. It will make us more empathetic, inclined to share, collaborate, and connect even more. The Internet is rewiring our brains to think interdependently, changing the way we connect to the world, online and offline.

(http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-fourteen-september/the-emerging-global-mind/) regarding the movie Connected that will open this fall in major cities nationwide this weekend). For more information, go to http://connectedthefilm.com, Connected the Film on Facebook, or @tiffanyshlain on Twitter

Breaking Old Tired Notions To Create Anew

“So yup, our town is going to make jeans again. I know it won’t be easy. I know in some ways we have chosen a more difficult path to tread. And I know I have to make the numbers add up too. But for me, the great brands of the world make a great product but also have a clear understanding of their purpose. They understand the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. I believe the notion that we can’t make in the UK and still be a successful business needs to be challenged. Here goes.”

by these good folks at Huit.

Cooperation vs. Capitalism.

The great mass of people are not capitalists; they are not hoarders; they are unwilling to ‘buy low and sell high’ when it harms their fellows. A capitalist is someone who has collected wealth sufficiently, most often from the work of others, to use that wealth to gather more wealth controlling the work of those others. This may be what we have become, but it is not where we began: The human animal is a cooperative species, the distribution of information, goods and services has been an essential survival behavior for the millions of years that our genus has been on earth. This is our context, this is who we are.

More here on job creation and the economy:

Enterprise 2.0 is really Entitlement 2.0

Hierarchy, process and automation are returning to their proper place – as tools that support human efficiency and capability. Rather than the 20th century model of people existing to keep the processes running, we are now flipping it around so that processes exist to support us. Processes and automation amplify human capability. Importantly, there is another profound amplifier of human capability – and that is other humans! The focus on collaboration fueled by radically improved communication and the internet that William Gibson deliciously described as our “increasingly efficient, communal, prosthetic memory” is dramatically changing how we think about organizational structure, efficiency, learning and innovation – even if most people have never heard of Complexity Theory.

By Deb Lavoy on her blog. More here.

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Must-Read Weekend Reading …

Nilofer Merchant — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:30:19 +0000

Wall Street rewards New Product Lines
“There’s tremendous pressure on companies, particularly publicly traded companies, to grow and grow. You see, for the most part shareholders don’t profit from steadily profitable business, but unexpected growth. Microsoft grew profit by 30% year over year, and the stock market said meh. For a company as successful as Microsoft’s been, even that kind of growth is priced in. The best way to grow is to open up new markets or create and deliver popular new products. Here, Apple’s success in the last few years is the model; not only do Americans love iPhones and iPads, but the company’s devices are exploding globally, especially in Asia, in a way that they never have before. The latter is a much bigger deal in sheer numbers than, say, iPhones running on Verizon or Sprint. But even that kind of modest domestic expansion is a route to growth. So Apple sits on its giant cash hoard, refraining from making high-profile acquisitions, because it doesn’t need to grow that way.”

In a Wired article by Tim Carmody, entitled, Three Lessons From Two Months of Tech-Sector Madness Link: here. He is a gem of a writer I’m glad to have ‘discovered’ this week.

Image from Ethean Zonca.

Leadership = Leading, not Klout Scores

“Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. The include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about.”

In a post by Caterine Fake, the Internet Entrepreneur behind Flickr and Etsy, on ‘make things’. It made the rounds, and could very well be a rallying cry to all entrepreneurs to focus on creating things that matter, rather than valuations and terms sheets and exit strategies. Let us hope.

Government & Innovation (don’t mix)
“The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply a symbol of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor, than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised.”

— In Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik takes a look at a new crop of books tackling the topic of America’s potential decline, including That Used To Be Us, by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. That book’s title comes from a remark made by President Obama in regard to the decline of innovation in the United States, and Gopnik does a great job of illuminating the complexity of the challenges facing any government-sponsored innovation programs.

(h/t to Helen Walters, who uses Tumbler to curate/edit amazing content)

End Malaria
And, if you haven’t already …Please join me in buying this book (and perhaps saving a life or two or 20 in a simple act.) If that isn’t enough reason, it has contributions from 61 authors other than myself, who did a rather splendid job. Micro-actions, as Cindy Gallop would say, will change the world.

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Why the How Matters

Nilofer Merchant — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:53:51 +0000

Connecting with friends now that the New How book is done about why I wrote it and the journey of 10 years it took me to really get why the “how” matters as much as the “what”. He wrote back something that is worth sharing:

About the how mattering as much as the what…may be it matters even more for us, because behind every move, decision, achievements we make there’s a shadow of that move, that decision, that achievement, something that stays in us and shape who we are…and get transmitted to others so that when we’re gone, we’re not quite gone. That’ why the how matters so much.

He’s right.

When we change the state of “work” to focus on getting the right what by doing the best how, we are also enabling a corporate state of being that allows for people to be heard, to be seen, to contribute, to be alive and so on. This does show up in outcomes because talented creative people ultimately create more value when they bring the best of themselves to the game. Those are soft words so it would be easy to discount them as not mattering.

But it does matter that the human spirit is fully alive. Even at work.

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Little Things Like Pictures

Nilofer Merchant — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:47:13 +0000

Friend/colleague writes he saw this “On the shelf at my local Barnes and Noble. In UTAH. So cool.”

It’s always the little things that can help brighten a day, isn’t it?

What’s your little thing?

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Is Business a Community?

Nilofer Merchant — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:21:57 +0000

Yesterday, a debate ensued about whether business is a community.
It is not said one party; community is this soft thing and business is fundamentally about the results that a company creates. Results, as in money. That’s it. Bottom line.
But is that really the whole story? I would argue that business is about community because together this combination of workers toil in the exchange of ideas thas creates something. That something either directly or indirectly contributes to “creating value”. Leaders help to create the context and culture where this exchange of ideas happens, and they also create a culture where beliefs about “what matters” are held in common. Held in common, as in held by community.
Without a community of people joined together, you couldn’t really have a larger mission like Facebook’s “our mission is helping people understand the world around them” or Google’s: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. An individual really couldn’t take on that mission, but a community of like-minded, like directed people of passion could. So isn’t business a community?
Thoughts?

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CNET: Note to privacy advocates: good luck

Nilofer Merchant — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:27:06 +0000

Google is back in the news as another privacy group gets hot and bothered about their eye in the sky.
No one wants a satellite snooping, but the privacy group actually posted Street View directions to a Google exec’s home online. Speaking as one who has seen firebombing near the UCSC campus this week to protest the research work done by various professors, I think the group went too far. Read on…
“There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the privacy intrusions of Google Maps’ Street View, but one privacy group went a bit overboard with an attack on the search giant’s all-seeing eye.
“Google’s hypocrisy is breathtaking,” accused Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, in a statement last week. Perhaps, but he would have been better to pick stronger grounds for his conclusion.
The center provided two recent quotations from Google as evidence. First was “privacy does not exist,” from Google’s May 28 rebuttal to an April invasion-of-privacy suit related to Street View. Second was “Google takes privacy very seriously,” from Google’s response to a request that California’s attorney general scrutinize privacy implications of Google’s ad partnership with Yahoo.
The National Legal and Policy Center took a jab at Google by posting Street View directions to a top Google executive’s house.
Those two statements indeed appear contradictory. The trouble is that the center significantly distorted the first, which actually was the much milder assertion, “Today’s satellite-image technology means that…complete privacy does not exist.” ”
Read the rest here.

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The Wall Street Journal: Web Piracy: The Enemy Within?

Nilofer Merchant — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:07:15 +0000

While this Wall Street Journal story is about the entertainment industry, all of us involved in software would do well to take a look. Piracy of all kinds costs our industry billions every year, representing profits lost for shareholders. Some companies look the other way, others see it as a clandestine marketing tool.
Maybe it’s time we rethink our strategy. Dollars lost also mean jobs lost – not something anyone wants to see given the current economic situation. Kudos to Ethan Smith and Sarah McBride for a thought-provoking piece.
“In a situation that highlights the challenges faced by entertainment companies and artists in the digital age, a case of alleged Internet piracy is now coming under scrutiny as a possible promotional stunt by a band’s own handlers.
When a track from a forthcoming album by hard-rock band Buckcherry leaked onto the Internet a few weeks ago, the Los Angeles quintet was quick to complain in a blog and a press release from their label, Warner Music Group Corp.’s Atlantic Records. Nonetheless, the band quickly released a music video for the song, “Too Drunk. . .”; radio stations around the U.S. began playing it, and within weeks the song entered the top 40 of two rock charts published by Billboard magazine.”
See the rest here.

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