If you don’t know where you are going.
You may never get there. Yogi Berra
Success, is often a by-product of passionate focus.
Pick the most successful person you can think of, what are they always rambling on about? It’s that obsession that makes them keep coming back to the same topic over and over.
The more they exercise that obsessions, the more expertise and experience they gain in the field. Practice makes perfect and if you run the cycle a few too many times - voila, success.
Jeff? Customer obsession.
Kept him shy of profits made Amazon first to the trillion dollars race.
Sheryl? Jonny? Kara? Ray? Beyoncé?
Scale, design, reporting, investing, art.
Successful professionals.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. Dad
You will still show up to the office. Possibly even more than most. But you’ll get paid to improve yourself. Like a professional athlete. Win, win.
Scott Galloway, or ‘Prof Gallo’ 🐓as I like to fantasize I’d call him, indirectly inspired a lot of my thinking around this topic.
His passion and dedication to the study of packaging and distribution in the age of the information revolution is really what pushed me to ask myself the question. What is my thesis?
Hockey stick growth
For those of you who don’t believe in capitalism 👇
How did we add $100+ trillions worth of collective productivity within the last two centuries of a two millenniums timespan?!
C’on think about. It’s insane. Less than 4 generations ago ya’ll lived in dirt and now you facetime your boos. Insane.
As much as I hate to admit, it was thanks to a french man.
Long story short the industrial revolution played a major role into increasing productivity and getting people out of fields and onto computers (with a short detour thorough the factory floor).
What’s most crazy to me is that all of our current business infrastructure (think of methods, jargon, education and even the stock market) has developed to serve that specific needs of that very business framework.
Sell more soap bars
At the core of the industrial revolution we find ‘products’. Not the digital kind, actual manufactured goods that are made in mass quantities for the lowest possible price.
Great system, helped billions of people satisfy their basic needs like food, shelter and sanitation. Major, major props to humanity there.
Among the few downsides, we are now stuck using methods of production that all revolve around a linear output. The factory output.
You see, just like when you shop at Costco, anything that comes in bulk is a bargain and a burden. If you don’t consume it fast enough it will take up space, spoil, or plain bore you.
Except for rich hoarders nobody likes surplus inventory.
So how do you do this? How do you get rid of goods at the same rate as they are being produced?
Enter the magical world of sales and marketing. The invisible hand that will lift demand for your soap bars helping you get rid of surplus inventory.
Regional sales offices, representatives, advertising, campaigns. Throw your hat in the ring. You name it, we did it. All for the sake of keeping the stock room empty and the coffers full of green.
The future is now
If you were born before dial-up connections were ubiquitous you may never get it. And that’s ok. Don’t fight it, just embrace it. If things got disorienting as of lately is normal. We just fully transitioned into the information revolution.
Dejavù? No. I believe you never fully live a revolution until the generation at the helm of history has no recollection nor taste as per what was it like before. That is when bias for the old way of doing things it’s at its minimum.
And yes, you may argue you had News Papers, Radio and TV long before blogs, podcasts and streaming were a thing, but don’t be fooled. Formats may be similar yet there is a fundamental shift at the very core of our production model.
Now Marx strategy wasn’t wrong. It’s the execution that got completely fucked up. As everything in life, ideas are cheap and its execution that really matters.
Workers of this day and age are able to size the means of production.
Or rather, means of production of the information revolution are far more accessible to workers than they ever been during the industrial revolution.
Where are we headed
I believe we are headed towards an economy that is powered by a long-tail of needs where the supply is enabled by decentralized production on a large scale.
Software, apparel, books. If you got a weird ass idea that would never reach scale with the traditional industrial model, chances are today you can still be successful.
If you don’t know how, it’s just because you were not trained to size the opportunity, and books about this topic yet have to be written.
We are living in a hybrid transition period where the two models co-exist and thrive side by side. However, eventually life will be so different that even your regular factory will no longer feel like it used to.
And here lies the opportunity. To build, tool and equip not just a new version of the same old, but a completely different way of doing things.
I’d like to find out how to build, scale and maintain companies within the information vs industrial paradigm.
A new way of doing business that is no longer constrained by the linear output of the factory.
If you were to start from scratch today. How would you do it?
