The Restless Mind

Farhad Manjoo at Slate thinks we should “Fear the Kindle” and suggests Amazon will hamstring publishing the way Apple did the music industry.

We can only hope.

New markets or categories are always created by one player. It’s a feature, not a bug.

One player MUST initially dominate the new category to carve the way and make sense of it to consumers. Kodak, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Miramax, and Threadless didn’t emerge as leaders so much by designing new products as they did by contextualizing new ideas. By creating understanding during times of change—in some kind of marketable form factor—they were rewarded by patronage.

Where was non-professional photography before Kodak? Multiplex art-house films before Miramax? Or crowdsourced t-shirts before Threadless? Nowhere.

Each category-in-waiting, like every idea, needs an author to shape and sell it. Once they do, consumers can understand and buy it.

And like authorship, only one person can write the story. (How many of your favorite novels were written by committee?) That’s essential to your enjoyment, but it’s also essential to the author.

Founders, like writers, must wrestle with ambiguous ideas and make sense of them, trimming unnecessary features while retaining the core. In the process, they reveal to themselves the hidden themes that make the concept valuable. It’s that clarity that helps them position their product to solve our problem.

When Bill Gates realized he could syndicate his OS, he was able to articulate his vision for “a computer on every desk in every home” and the personal computing era bloomed. In turn, WE made Microsoft a monopoly as thanks for ushering-in the digital age.

When Harvey Weinstein tinkered with foreign-film aesthetics by adding Hollywood casting and multiplex distribution, he created the modern indie and trumped Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute who had been laboring on the idea for years. As a result, Miramax defined—and dominated—film during the 90s and ushered in an era of storytelling so skilled that it was dubbed the “new realism.”

When Steve Jobs linked the player, the store, and the jukebox, he joined the ranks of Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke by demonstrating the future and articulating something we all sensed but couldn’t define. As a result, iPod’s musical ecosystem and Apple were rewarded with a monopoly.

(Hint: monopolies, like Barack Obama, are voted into power to make change when the presiding regime no longer works.)

So when Manjoo quotes Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as saying “Everyone is worried that Amazon will end up becoming to books what Apple is to music,” hum a silent prayer this comes true. Traditional publishing is broken. Digital publishing is a mess. We should be so lucky to have someone fix it.

The Kindle + store + wireless is preceded by Sony’s Reader by years and several other “well positioned” players. What happened? Their story made no sense. They revealed no purpose. They generated no clarity. (They’re the Jonathan Franzen of their category: byzantine and commercially unviable.)

If Amazon DOES come to dominate the market, it will be because Bezos’ unlocked the mystery of digital publishing and penned a story we could all understand (and threw in one-click convenience!)

Fear the reaper. Fear another Franzen novel. But not the Kindle.

Summary: American innovation is stumbling, reports BusinessWeek. Yet P&G reports that 10 years of innovation have doubled their sales to $80b. How? By operating in an analogue equivalent to the “link economy.”

BusinessWeek’s Chief Economist Mike Mandel recently penned “Can America Invent Its Way Back?” and highlighted that while the US spends on R&D, it doesn’t get its bang for its buck:

“Since 2000, the nation’s public and private sectors have poured almost $5 trillion into research and development and higher education, the key contributors to innovation. Nevertheless, employment in most technologically advanced industries has stagnated or even fallen. The number of domestic jobs in the computer and electronics sector continues to plunge while pharmaceutical and biotech companies lay off as many workers as they hire. And even the industry category that includes Google (GOOG)—Internet publishing and Web search portals—has added only 15,000 jobs since 2003.”

Mandel’s piece goes on to suggest that “innovation economics” are an important part of the road forward, stressing that idea management, culture, and “creation economics” are the antidote to traditional economic thinking that emphasize taxes, inflation, and cost-control.

He’s right, of course. Corporations (and the infrastructure that supports them like public labs, universities, and policy makers) are still in an industrial-age hangover, too blurry-eyed to notice that their organizational DNA—a military blueprint that favors information asymmetry and strict vertical hierarchies—is counterproductive to the post-grid era, a network model that encourages edge-competencies and group coordination.

Today, companies that act porously—enabling and encouraging the flow of IP and talent in and out of their sphere of influence—are winning. Google is an obvious example, an organization that thrives largely by coordinating—rather than suppressing—the flow of information between people and markets.

So remarkable is their success that the “link economy” has become an increasingly recognizable phenomena, a pattern that spotlights value wherever it resides and manages abundance rather than controls scarcity.

Proctor and Gamble seems to understand this, despite their distance from Mountain View. Under the stewardship of A.G Lafley the Cincinnati manufacturer, responsible for all number of household items from Tide to Swiffer to Oil of Olay, has doubled its revenue to US$80b by focusing on innovation alone.

Lafley wrote about the firm’s approach in Strategy+Business, noting a few key points about the aggregation and syndication (my words) of IP and people:

“We focused on creating a practice of open innovation: taking advantage of the skills and interests of people throughout the company and looking for partnerships outside P&G.

We grow our business in these countries only by consistently developing new products, processes, and forms of community presence. And to do that, we need to involve people, inside the company and out, who are comfortable and familiar with the values and needs of consumers in these parts of the world.

We move people around geographically. We bring people into our Cincinnati headquarters from around the world, and we make a point of moving our headquarters people to our global businesses. Almost all of us have worked outside our home region. Almost all of us have worked in developing or emerging markets. And almost all of us have worked across the businesses. We track that progress very carefully.”

And on their substantial retooling of Febreeze for the Japanese market, he notes:

“This is a story we tell ourselves at P&G to drive home the need for integrative thinking. The project started with a consumer-centric concept. It involved people in a variety of functions and at least two regions. It opened our team members’ eyes to other possibilities. And it came to fruition because we were skilled at having the kinds of processes and conversations that would lead people to synthesize their ideas.”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Work across boundaries and find value wherever it resides, use integrative thinking, be open to mistakes and possibilities, and, importantly, include people from “outside” the firm with cultural differences to highlight opportunity.

What’s ironic (or sad, or both) is that while Lafley’s been talking about this for ten years, P&G’s peers—big, traditional, manufacturing-oriented companies—still don’t seem to get it. “Most companies are unwilling to draw on outside expertise,” notes Mandel in his BusinessWeek piece.

Furthermore, most are scared:

“Globalizing research and production can also alter the direction of technological change—with potentially negative effects on U.S. prosperity. MIT’s Acemoglu, who holds dual American and Turkish citizenship, argues in his work that in the past U.S. companies directed their research to take advantage of the well-educated American workforce. Now, as more multinationals move operations overseas, they are developing technologies adapted for their less skilled foreign workforces. In other words, offshoring is affecting the direction of innovation in ways that are more favorable to countries such as China and India. In particular, says Acemoglu, “China is going to have a major effect on technology.”

Perhaps CEO’s would find Threadless a less intimidating case study than P&G. Skinny Corp, the Chicago-based owners of Threadless, have proven that peer-production—a native business model in the network economy—can provide high margins AND avoid commoditization.

Threadless sells t-shirts (a commodity business if ever there was one) but does so by aligning the t-shirt designers with customers—much the same way that Google connects publishers and advertisers. Their monthly design contest receives thousands of submissions from designers around the world (none who work for them) and tens of thousands of votes from their rabid fan base.

The result: a business that manages abundance (t-shirt ideas), provides value through transparency (the audience becomes both editor and consumer), and values the flow of IP and talent through them—rather than by them. (Doc Searls calls this kind of value “a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”)

Can applying “link economy” strategies work for “traditional” companies? Here are Jeff Jarvis’ four principles. And below is a modified version, applied to companies in pursuit of innovation:

1. All companies must be transparent. Your talent base and IP must be exposed and connected. They’re not useable unless they’re linked.

2. The recipient of IP and talent is the party responsible for monetizing them. The more you enable the flow of IP and talent AWAY from you, the more it comes BACK—with greater value and skills to monetize. Just watch how Hollywood operates.

3. A porous organization is the key to efficiency. In other words: do what you do best and link to the rest.

4. There are opportunities to add value atop the IP and talent layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity. The market needs help finding the good stuff; that curation is a business opportunity.

A final note. The roots of the link economy are empathy (rather than “ego,” which is the root of the industrial economy. More on that in another post.) Abundance causes anxiety. Those who can carefully manage, curate, design, and syndicate value reduce customer anxiety and create stronger links.

And in the “all this has happened before” footnote, consider the strategy of retailer Rowland Macy who, 140 years ago, counseled his employees to help shoppers find what they were looking for even if it meant sending them across the street to their competitors. Sending people away, just like Google, established Macy’s as the definitive department store.

A lighthearted post wherein the spectacle of a cheerleading competition is backdrop to the theme of nurturing innovation. Managers, take note: you are the parents in the story.

If you’ve ever fought for a unconventional idea and been defeated by the righteousness of the “safe and secure,” you can find solidarity with the girls of the St. Mark’s cheerleading squad who placed third at this weekend’s Ultimate Holiday Cheer competition in Stittsville, Ontario.

That they were trumped by two other teams is not injustice, given all the teens in the competition were enterprising and deserving of some reward, but it was a subtle and rather sad commentary on what we teach our youth about risk, creativity, and the pursuit of innovation.

For those not among the six hundred or so squeezed into Sacred Heart’s High School on Saturday, let me provide this quick background: cheerleading competitions pit teams of roughly 20 girls against one another and ask them to develop a three-minute routine that consists of much body flipping, hip-hop, and eyeliner. Apparently by scorecard, the judges dole out points for technical and creative application in much the same way they do at the Olympics (whether there was collusion between the French judge and Russian performers I can’t be sure: there were far too many pubescent boys ogling the competitors and blocking my view).

The point about the Olympics, though, is what left me shaking my head as the St. Mark’s team was ranked third. While they had made technical errors—and clearly enough to push the other two teams to second and first place—their routine was by far more imaginative, daring, and—as I assume cheerleading is supposed to be—entertaining.

This seemed as lost on the cheerleading judges as those at the Olympics, whose awarding has become so technical in order to remove the prejudice of taste that they have eroded creative enterprise by rewarding enterprise alone. Any casual observer can tell you that gymnasts now favor a series of safe maneuvers to create a strong composite score rather than attempting risky expressions that are prone to misfire. Watch any floor routine and you’ll notice just that: routine. No magnificence from movement but rather, magnificence of mechanics.

Of course, if you remove the prejudice of judges and rely on the marketplace, you’ll find creative expression wins hands down. That’s why people crave iPods, howl at Chris Rock, and, in something closer to cheerleading, flock by the millions to catch Cirque du Soleil. We seek inspiration and cherish those who deliver it.

So why complain if these kids will find this out for themselves? Why bother to mention that the process of innovation and the output of creative thought will help them succeed if it’s all around us? Well, because they’re kids, that’s why. Because they go to school to learn about what they’ll need to survive in the world. And when the tyranny of a few judges gets them down, they need to be reminded that even if they didn’t win, their creative instincts where bang on.

To the grown ups in that gymnasium (or any other gymnasium), I ask these questions: when should we reward our kids? When they win? Or when they inspire us? Sometimes they do not come hand-in-hand and we must choose.

As for me, I salute the girls of St. Mark. While I think you need to wear more clothes (a point my son will most certainly disagree with), you needn’t feel less proud.