Supple (E)

0:00Supple is undeniably a cool word. It's onomatopoeic. It sounds like it is. It's something we all aspire to. Nobody says, I wish I was more brittle. Hey, it's Ajay, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:25What will you do when the world changes? Because the world is going to change. This is certain. The world has been changing for as long as there have been species on the planet, And if you work in an organization or if you work in our culture, trying to get picked, trying to pick others, trying to make a change happen, the one thing that is certain is that the world will change. And it will change faster than you expect. So supple resilience is a choice. It is an outlook. It is a way we can plan our day, our week, our month, and our career. So let's start with the example of Lucille Ball. Using the human larynx as a sounding board for mechanical sound is the latest wonder of science.

1:19The human voice isn't used. Only the mechanical sounds are afflicted from the larynx as the silent lips form the words. Listen to Lucille Ball. I've just returned from a trip across country by rail. And at every crossing, this is the way the train whistle sounded to me. In 1939, Lucille Ball made a video, a movie, as an actress, talking about a new kind of technology. She went on to be a star on Broadway, and then, of course, on television. As technologies changed, so did she, where she stood, how she worked. As she matured in her career, she became the first woman to run a studio in Hollywood.

2:04if it weren't for Lucille Ball, there'd be no Star Trek.

2:14Space, a final frontier.

2:22And there'd be no Mission Impossible.

2:35What Lucille Ball didn't do was insist that the world stay the way it was in 1939. What Lucille Ball didn't do was dig in, hold on, and insist that the way she was doing things was the way they had to be. This, of course, is how the French got completely clocked by the Germans. because if you build fortifications in the ground that you can't move, you have built a brittle defense. Sports teams make this choice all the time. Are they going to staff and hire for one particular way of being, for one competitive strategy? Because while that may work in the short run, when the opposition changes their plans and their approach, you are stuck or consider financial investments.

3:28If we invest all of our money in a certain way with a certain thesis and the world changes, then our brittle strategy is going to make us unhappy. Eddie! Eddie! So I want to talk about seven elements that are involved in making our choice, our difficult choice about choosing to be resilient and supple in the face of change. These affect freelancers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, people building organizations, folks trying to make a living and building a career. The first one is scale. What we know is that the bigger you get, the more dependencies you have, the more difficult it is to change what you do.

4:24So McDonald's, for example, with all of those franchises, with all of those stores, is operating at a completely different scale than a mom-and-pop store down the street. So if the neighborhood shifts to vegan, if the neighborhood shifts to people who are more mindful and careful about what they're eating, McDonald's has to just live with it. They can't change quickly and well in the face of that because they would have to change in tens of thousands of locations. McDonald's does not succeed because they are supple or resilient. They succeed because they have made a significant bet on how culture and the food chain work.

5:07And as long as they are right, they will do great. And as soon as it changes, they will struggle. So the scale that we choose influences how supple we're going to be in the face of change. I'm not saying that big is always wrong. It's not that the only way to make public company returns is to be a big public company. But we also know that if you enter a marketplace that's chaotic, where you fully expect change to happen, Over-investing in scale will strain your resources as soon as the world changes. Number two, a simple rule about money. And it's related to scale. And the rule is don't run out.

5:55It is much easier to be supple when your scale is appropriate to the amount of cash you have on hand. When you don't have the ability to go through a dry period when you're going from A to B, it's stressful. And you will not be able to invest properly when the world changes. So what we know is that long-lived organizations and that happy careers tend to be ones that live within their means, that have enough of a reserve that when the world changes, they can get the new resources they need to dance with the new world order. The third one is making the choice to talk about it. That often what we do when faced with a changing world is we become even more brittle because we believe deep down that if we don't talk about it, it will go away.

6:55And so we see the giant technology corporations, the Western Unions or the AT &Ts, that relentlessly refused to aggressively talk about the changes in their industry. In the case of Western Union, they never recovered. In the case of AT &T, it was only because they got broken up that they were able to dig in deep and figure out how the new world would interact with the scale that they had already built. Same thing happened at Microsoft. It was only when Bill Gates wrote his famous memo to everyone in the company about the internet that the company started to pay attention to the shift that was happening.

7:37He was probably two years too late talking about it. That if Microsoft had talked about it with themselves two years earlier, if they had engaged more directly with the technologists on the outside, the future would have been totally different for that company. It's super easy to decry what your competitor does when he or she is trying to change the world. Steve Jobs goes to Macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that? $500 fully subsidized with a plan? I said, that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.

8:25So when Steve Ballmer famously said that the iPhone was going to be a failure, he was being arrogant because he was refusing to talk about it. Talking about the pressures and the shifts is the only way that we can evolve our thinking and discover the new places we ought to be going. The fourth idea is mindfulness. In any given moment, as the world is changing, we have to make a choice. Do we wish to will it to be different than it is? to insist loudly that it is not fair, that we have to push hard against it? Or can we see it, name it, accept it, and dance with it? It's raining outside. It doesn't matter that you weren't planning for it to be raining outside.

9:16It doesn't matter that raining outside makes it unlikely that you will hit your goals for next week. It's still going to rain outside. So being mindful of that, aware of that, acknowledging that the world is changing is totally different than denying it. So the most expensive mistake I ever made in terms of dollars. The year was 1993. I was running Yo-Yo Dine, which was one of the very first internet companies. We were pioneering the way email could be used in the way companies interacted with consumers. Everything we built was on Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, other online platforms, and it ran by email.

10:03Someone who worked with me showed me the first version of the World Wide Web. And I looked at this, this clunky, slow, free, commerce-free platform, and I said, that's nuts. That's nuts. It's slower than Prodigy. There is no business model. Don't waste my time. because I refused to see the change that the World Wide Web was going to cause. It took us over a year to catch up to what was going on. In that year, I didn't start a search engine. In that year, I didn't buy the 100 domains that we would need. In that year, I didn't think deeply about how the World Wide Web, worldwide and a web, was going to change everything.

10:50and the reason was I was brittle. My scale was too big. We didn't have enough money. We were not resilient. We were brittle and my response to being brittle was to ignore the world as it was changing. I hope I've learned a lesson from that. The world doesn't change more slowly when you fight against it. The fifth idea goes back to what I said earlier. This is a choice. We make the choice to be resilient. We make the choice to have reserves. We make the choice to be mindful, to talk about it, to pick an appropriate scale so that we can be nimble when the world changes. Because if we bet that the world is going to change, we may very well be right.

11:39Two more. The sixth one is a bias for experiments. That if we use the analogy of evolution, what we know is that fruit flies evolve very quickly. The reason is because they have a short lifespan and they have lots of kids. So these experiments lead to all sorts of interactions with the environment, and the ones that mutate in the way that works with the environment of the moment are the ones that succeed. So there is a bias among organizations and people with a career to not be wrong. to do what's going to work, to be right and right and right. But if you are focused all the time on that, you're not really doing experiments.

12:26What you're doing is waiting for perfect, which means you're not evolving, which means you can't stay on the edge that got you here. That's probably a mistake. That when we have the appropriate scale and the appropriate resources, both of which are choices, then we are in a position, as Lucille Ball was, to cycle and cycle and cycle. That if you had asked her in 1939, hey, Lucy, in 30 years, do you think you'll be running a studio that makes a science fiction TV show? The answer was certainly no. But if you said, hey, Lucy, you're not the prettiest actress. You're not the actress that's going to be in Gone with the wind.

13:08How are you going to make a living doing this? My guess is her answer was, I'm scrappy and I'm going to keep trying things until I figure out what works. And then the last one, the seventh one, is how fast are your cycles? And this is where we run headlong into the dip, which is my book about quitting. If your cycles are too short, you'll always be starting, starting, starting and you will never be able to get through the dip to the other side where you are seen as good at something. But the alternative is if you dig in for the infinite long haul, you will stay too long. So here's an example of how all seven fit together.

13:51And both paths could make sense. Consider the bookseller. The bookseller who said, look, books have been around for 500 years. Retail it's been around for a thousand. I'm going to own a little tiny bookstore and that's what I'm going to do. Well, you might know someone like that, but they're probably out of business now. Compare that to the luthier, the person who makes violins in the spirit of Stradivarius. The thing is, her scale is perfect. Her scale is perfect because she only needs to sell a violin once a week, twice a week, to be fine, to be happy. So by picking an appropriate scale, it doesn't matter that violins aren't purchased the way violins used to be purchased.

14:35It's enough. It's enough that even though the world changes, she's resilient because her scale works. Bill Graham, the famous rock promoter, he's a person who brought us to Grateful Dead, so many other groups that came out of the West Coast. The name of Bill Graham's company was Bill Graham Presents. What does Bill Graham present? Well, that's a great question. And he was resilient because the rules were simple. If there was a venue that he had a relationship with and there was an artist that could bring something live to people who would go to that venue, well, then Bill Graham was happy to present you.

15:20Yes, he had a point of view. Yes, there were things he wanted to do and things he didn't. But there aren't a lot of connections between The Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen, other than the fact that they were musicians who played in a venue for an audience. That's a recipe for resilience. Because when the world changed, when music changes, and it always does, Bill Graham could present it. So the challenge that we have going forward is not, how do we keep the world from changing? The challenge we have going forward is to say, oh, the world changed. What should I do with this? In 1986, I published my first book.

16:06That was 33 years ago. Since then, I've published my work in online services, on CD-ROMs, on floppy disks, on the World Wide Web, in e-books, audio books, and yes, this podcast. I've done it from live stages, and I've done it with remote broadcasts. I don't care. I don't care how the world changes, because I can't do anything about that. What I can say is the medium is going to change, and I am eager to be resilient as it does because the mission remains the same. Who can we teach? Who can we connect? Who can we elevate? And the scale is appropriate to do that work. Don't fall in love with the medium.

16:58Fall in love with the mission. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth. Alicia from Charleston here. Hi, Seth. This is Anupam. Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. We love hearing from you. We're not going to answer a question from the machine this time.

17:35Instead, from two meetings I had in the last week, the same question came up. For next week and for future weeks, please don't hesitate to reach out with your questions. Visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. There you will find show notes for every single one of the more than 50 episodes. In addition, a link to ask a question. We would love to hear from you. So here's how the question came up. Someone was working on an important project, and they said to me, 2 % of the items that were shipping are getting returned. People are really upset about the way the item is designed. And then the very next day, someone said to me, yeah, things are going really well, but we have about one out of 10 people giving us a one-star review.

18:30In both cases, we have to begin by looking at the fact that 2 % or 1 % or even 5 % isn't a very big number. 2 % means that you're getting a 98 % on the test. So first, we've got to find out, Are we actually hearing from everyone who's got a defect, from everyone who's upset, or are we missing a lot of people who are upset but not telling us? But if we get past that and we come to the conclusion that we are delighting 90 % of our readers, getting a five-star review from them, that we are shipping a product that works perfectly for 98 % of the people who are using it, I think we have to understand that there is a difference between vivid feedback and accurate feedback.

19:28Vivid feedback knocks on your door. Vivid feedback feels like a badge of shame. Vivid feedback is in public. Vivid feedback is really tempting to ignore. Years ago, I was talking to Joe Sugarman, the guy who did all those crazy direct marketing ads in magazines in the 1980s and 90s. And everything he did came with a money back guarantee. And I said to him, what's the typical rate of returns that you're getting for these blue blocker sunglasses and other stuff you sell? And he proudly said, between 5 % and 10%. He said, if it drops below 5%, then I know I'm not being bold enough in the way I talk about it.

20:14He was looking at the returns as a way of identifying people who were letting him know it wasn't for them. The same way, if we look at the reviews for To Kill a Mockingbird or any Harry Potter book or Pick Your Favorite book, There are a ton of one-star reviews. More one-star reviews for those items than for the typical book or podcast or anything else. More one-star reviews. Why is that? Two reasons. First of all, it's popular, so more people are reviewing it. But the second reason, the more important reason, is it stirs strong feelings. So these people with the product defect thing, well, maybe they have a problem with how clear their instructions are.

21:00Maybe they actually have a manufacturing problem. Both of those should be addressed. But if it turns out that two out of 100 people are gonna use it in a way that breaks it, give them their money back with a smile and a thank you. Because 98 % of the people are happy that you made this thing. And if we are going to shy away from making something because two out of 100 people aren't going to love it, then we're never going to make anything. That's important to understand that the most successful, best reviewed movies, TV shows, restaurants, books, widgets, whatever you name, the most successful ones don't get past 98%.

21:4795 % for an innovation, that's huge. So yes, we need to be really clear about what the user we seek to serve has as an experience for the thing we make. We don't want to make junk. We don't want to make promises that we can't keep. We don't want to show up hustling people for something that isn't real. But, and it's a huge but, vivid feedback is not more important than any other kind of feedback. It is simply vivid. And that means we have to go into it discounting its vividness. We have to go into it saying eagerly, thank you for letting me know. Thank you for helping me learn how to do even better next time.

22:37But what we can't take away from it is that somehow we've totally failed because that's just not true. There you go. Again, drop us a note for next time. We love to hear from you. keep making a ruckus. Thanks for listening.