October 20, 2004
start lots of conversations
Johnnie Moore, having read my Beermat post, makes an excellent point:
This resonates with my own agency experience, and is part of the huge downside to the "Big Idea" culture. Agencies persuade themselves that everything is about the big idea. The bigness of which is objectively determined by... the biggest ego in the building, usually. Or (just as bad) by a string of sleep-inducing focus groups around the country. In a networked world, it's much, much smarter to let the market determine the great ideas by starting lots of conversations instead of rigging up a giant 60 second propaganda dump."Start lots of conversations." Somebody tell me, what's so hard about that? How come people don't get it? Seriously, I want to know. Posted by hugh macleod at October 20, 2004 12:36 PM | TrackBack
"Somebody tell me, what's so hard about that? How come people don't get it? Seriously, I want to know."
I think you already know;
1) Ego.
2) The mentality that "I know what they want more than they do." The idea that the executive knows the market better than the market knows itself. Sometimes, this is correct, but I've found most times, it's asinine.
3) People with fancy degrees and/or job titles don't want the answer to be as simple as "let the market decide." It threatens their very existance, no?
4) Ego.
5. And Ego. ;-)
Posted by: hugh macleod at October 20, 2004 7:38 PMEgo certainly defines much of the approach, but let’s gets a bit real about one of the many simple truths of company culture:
They exist in an economy where growth equals success. No growth, even if the profits are healthy, is death to the market.
So let's say Ego stops becoming a defining problem. Let's start lots of conversations. Some things grow, most die, some grow for a while, then they die, some things grow but then lead onto other things (e.g. your competitor's things) and those things start growing instead...
[insert a multitude of possibilities here]
Unpredictability. Sure, the potential reward from organic growth is fantastic, but where do you draw a chart for that? How do you say to your investors "Well, we're gonna throw a load of seeds out into the firmament using our super-select team of opinion-growing experts, latch onto existing communities, create conversation spaces with rich multi-dimensional avenue branches - and see what happens."
??
It's great to be part of a conversation that you're not trying to drive for profit. But if you are, then certainty is a factor that refuses to disappear. The more so the more people you're employing, or want to employ.
Now Hugh may be using gapingvoid for many an agenda but the point is, He Has A Day Job. That's what sustains the conversation. And many people's conversations. He can dream in between thinking of delicious ways to sell a technology start up or differentiate one kind of washing powder from another (both of which are owned by the same company), but certainty, if only the certainty of the narrow-mindedness of people willing to sign big cheques, keeps him supplied with ink pens, postcards and heat in his home.
So you start thinking, well OK, you can do the conversation thing on the side of something already successful, when you have little to invest and little to lose. But then what happens when the conversation becomes a mature, product-shifting reality? Do you keep pumping out until the conversation stops (and hopefully another one you've instigated starts up a new profitable line in its place) or do you try like hell to keep it where it is?
How do you keep a conversation hot? How do you chart that? When do you say "Hell, the market's talking about something else this week, so our 3 year product development will just have to get trashed and it's time to start something new"?
With the least ego on the world, there's still the human desire for some solid foundation. Shifting sands are just that, never still for long.