Make a decision

It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.

In fact, make several. Make more decisions could be your three word mantra.

No decision is a decision as well, the decision not to decide. Not deciding is usually the wrong decision. If you are the go-to person, the one who can decide, you’ll make more of a difference. It doesn’t matter so much that you’re right, it matters that you decided.

Of course it’s risky and painful. That’s why it’s a rare and valuable skill.

Creating sustainable competitive advantage

No successful web company (not eBay, Flickr, Amazon, Facebook…) succeeds because of a significant technological barrier to entry. It’s not insanely difficult to copy what they’ve done. Yet they win and the copycats don’t.

Few organizations succeed in the long run because of proprietary technology. Not Starbucks or CAA or Nike, certainly. Not Caterpillar or Reuters either.

Technologists often tell me, “this product is very hard to build, that will insulate us from competition and protect our pricing.” It might. For a while. But once you’re successful, the competition will figure out a way. They always do.

So, what to do?

• You can own something that’s hard to copy (like real estate).
• You can race down the pricing and scale curve, so it’s cheaper for you to do what you do because you have a head start.
• You can create switching costs, so that the hassle and cost of moving to a cheaper competitor is so great, it’s just not worth it.
• You can build a network (which can take many forms–natural monopolies are organizations where the market is better off when there’s only one of you).
• You can build a brand (shorthand for relationships, beliefs, trust, permission and word of mouth).
• You can create a constantly innovating organization where extraordinary employees thrive.

The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it’s easier to create a network here than any other time in history.

market gravity

Everyone ‘believes’ in gravity. And yet, we know virtually nothing about it. We don’t know how gravity waves (if there are any) are transmitted. We can’t block them (anti gravity boots!) and we can’t amplify them and we have no idea how fast they travel. There are very few people doing serious gravity research and development, either. But it’s apparently a law.

Evolution (and one’s confidence or lack of belief thereof), on the other hand, is enough to sway a school board election or get you nominated for federal office. I’ve never met an informed person who doubted the general facts about evolution unless they had an alternative view of the origin of species that they felt emotionally connected to. There are evolution skeptics who would prefer a different story, but no gravity skeptics, even though there’s a lot less science there.

Need more time

First rule of decision making: More time does not create better decisions.

In fact, it usually decreases the quality of the decision.

More information may help. More time without more information just creates anxiety, not insight.

Deciding now frees up your most valuable asset, time, so you can go work on something else. What happens if, starting today, you make every decision as soon as you have a reasonable amount of data?

Proximity to pain

The closer you are to the point of need, the more you can charge.
Pizza at the airport costs five times more than pizza on the way to the airport.
Tax audit services in the middle of an SEC investigation cost triple what they cost before one.
Scalped tickets cost more than ones bought in advance, by mail.
Emergency towing in a strange town costs more too
The single easiest way to increase your fees is to get closer to the
pain. It’s interesting to note that no large-scale advertising ventures
are closer to the pain than the Yellow Pages or Google. Both of which
are insanely successful.

Enormity

Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.
Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.
If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.
Not fair, but true.

Square one is underrated

Perhaps the worst outcome most people can imagine when a project stutters is having to go, ‘all the way back to square one.’
Apparently, square one is an unhappy place, and far away, too.
Hey, if you’re lost, if you’ve gone down the wrong road, it doesn’t make sense to speed up and keep racing down the wrong road. Instead, the smart thing is to go back to the last spot you were in where you had a chance to find the right road and start from there.
Square one: nicer than people expect.