Split Personalities

I can recall a time in recent history when the majority of the people around me felt uncomfortable with online shopping.  At the turn of the century, websites like eBay were still seen as risky to a significant amount of the population.  The trust economy of the internet was still in it`s early adopters stage, as many still wrestled with the idea of buying something that they can`t physically see or touch.  Not to mention their reservations when it comes to giving out their credit card number to strangers they can`t even put a face to.  However, with the convenience, selection, and prices that the internet provided the marketplace, it was only a matter of time until more and more people got on board. Where the real growing pains for retail happened was not with the market, but with the companies themselves.

Many companies were faced with similar questions in the process of learning how to leverage the web for their business.  Should we enter into this realm or not? How do we participate in this space? How do we manage these operations?

Many companies struggled with incorporating their current business model with these new ones.  Many still operate their offline and online business fairly independently.  One thing's for sure is that online commerce has without a doubt established itself as a major player across all industries and continues to enable and reveal new opportunities that were impossible before.  So much so, that many giants in the offline world have been feeling the pressure to compete.

Best Buy has had a tough time during this mass exodus towards online, as many customers have used the big box store as a showroom gallery to gain the hands-on experience, just to complete the purchase with a different online retailer who was able to sell it for cheaper.  Online eye wear retailer Warby Parker  has recently developed an offline strategy that proves that online companies are not perfectly meeting the needs of the market either.

I believe that the next 10 years will introduce greater integration between between offline and online.  The line of distinction will become much more blurred as mobile technology that's paired with RFID, NFC, QR codes and the like continue to provide augmented shopping experiences in the offline environment.  Men's clothing store Hointer and Tesco's supermarket initiative in South Korea, are some early examples of where retail is going.  While in the meantime, some brick and mortars have taken to other means to negate the threats of showrooming in the short term, retailers will need to adopt more sustainable solutions that leverage the strengthens of both.

You talkin to me??

As fortunate as we are to be living in the information age, to have access to unprecedented amounts of information and knowledge at virtually any time and anywhere, shouldn't we all be able to be contestants on Jeopardy and do pretty well?  Call me a pessimist, but I don't think that's the case.

There have been periods in our collective history where knowledge and information was such a closely guarded asset.  It's been used to control and manipulate, to get rich off of, to strategize with- you name it.  People have fought for it, suffered for it, died for it, and so now we have it...  Shouldn't we be dancing in the streets, taking it all in like a kid who has been denied candy his whole life and finally gets a taste of the sweet nectar?  (Spoiler alert: The answer is no)

The human condition causes us to be obsessed with scarcity and nonchalant with ubiquity.  All the world's information that was once scares was once a thing of wonder that very few people had access to.  Today, all that illustrious information is just noise.  How is it that someone could have grown up and spent their whole life in New York City and have never gone to see the Statue of Liberty, or never stops to look up at the Empire State building every time they walk by; yet people flock from all around the world to do those very same things?  People are weird.

What color is your cow?
According to everybody's favorite marketer Seth Godin, because of the sheer volume of exposure that we have to information, we have no choice but to ignore the vast majority of it; and so the best way to combat just being a part of that noise is to stand out.  Break the monotony of your industry, your craft, your job, and you will begin to separate yourself.

The Longtail
As a brand, one of the best ways to ensure that people are listening to you, is to concentrate your efforts on only those segments of people who want to listen.  The concept of the longtail refers to the idea that as things become more specific the number of results will decrease.  This is important because as you become more specific, there will be less competition trying to say the same thing.  In other words, specificity -> scarcity -> people caring.

In The New Influencers, Paul Gillin discusses the origins of social media, and at the heart of it is the concept of the longtail.  Web 2.0 has enabled communities to form around any and EVERY topic, interest, activity, genre, fetish, lifestyle, and beliefs fathomable.  

Messaging that blankets a wide grouping of people has become noise, ubiquitous noise that we've become very good at ignoring.  If you want to be heard yes, you need to differentiate your message, but really you need to differentiate your DNA.  

Just because your message is out there, doesn't mean people are listening- just being out there isn't enough.  

Change is as change does

I often snicker to myself when I hear people talk about change management professionals, and I wonder how long can that last?  It wasn't so long ago that change and adaptation were things that only happened every now and then.  Many basked in the monotony of their daily routines that varied only slightly year by year.  Every function had it's place, and every place had it's function.  Distinction and clarity was a must.  In that kind of environment, when something changed you had better hoped you had a fancy change management consultant to help take your woes away.  I exaggerate of course, but a lot of companies excelled by having linear workers because repetition improved efficiency.  But those days are dying quickly.

The hand is quicker than the eye
In today's ever changing, fast paced world change management no longer comes in the form of a consultant that can be brought in.  It's something that everybody needs to embody.  Things are changing at an alarming rate.  The internet ages everything exponentially quicker. Where fashion, standards, and opinions can morph in the blink of an eye, how does anyway settle into a routine?

The only thing that's certain is that the way you're doing whatever it is you're doing today, will be different in a year from now.  And at the route of all this is Information Liquidity.  The more that we have access to, the more that we know; the more that we know, the more that we change.

This ain't Kansas anymore
The concept of opening up your business to the public, by way of social media or crowdsourcing, was a scary leap for many brands and now that they`re out there, it can be even scarier.  With so much transparency, a brand needs to stay agile to compliment the environment that it`s operating in.

So What?
This week I read The Dawn of the Human Network, the introduction from the book crowdsourcing and also watched a short video called The Crowdsourcing Evolution.  The flexibility and "change management," that is required to manage a brand in our newly connected world, requires us all to operate with less clarity and definition, less "control", and more blurred lines of responsibility.  

In the article How to Build your Startup without Learning Code, the author suggests ways for you, a non-programmer, to conceptualize ideas in a more tangible way.  Even though development and programming isn't your role, we all need to know how to speak the language, at least come close to it enough to communicate in some rudimentary form.  The lines are becoming blurred.  

The amount of communication that needs to happen between a brand and the public, requires even more communication to happen within the company.  Silo's will need to be torn down, functions will inter-lap, and change management WILL NOT come in the form of a man in a suit, but as daily routine.

It was the best of times...

Podcast: Welcome and Course Introduction.Business Model Generation, Video: Mitch Joel - The future of the web may not be social
video: Managing disruptive technologies: A conversation with investor Chamath Palihapitiya

This past week was exciting to say the least.  I was in Bloomington Indiana for my second connect week.  Although I slept less then I usually do, and I possibly ate more then I usually do, the challenges that we faced were without a doubt rewarding.  We worked with UAP, a Kenyan insurance company, and helped them work through some of the challenges that they presently face in their organization.  I loved it.

Nonetheless, the week wasn't all sunshine and lollipops.  This week also marked the beginning of the new quarter.  At a time when a pile of new information is dump on you, and you quickly try to make sense of it all just so you can have a glimmer of expectation for the coming weeks, I was stuck in a 10x10 room trying to help subsistent farmers escape the turmoils of poverty.  You would think that would warrant some slack.  Ahh, but such is life for a Kelley MBA :).

I did not have the chance to tackle all of the desired material this week, but I am definitely looking forward to getting completely caught up on all the responsibilities that I neglected during my stint on the lovely IU campus.  I did happen to catch the Welcome video- I wish more professors would record their videos with such quality- as an audiophile, it was greatly appreciated.  I believe that this was also the first time I've since a professor use prezi.  (Prezi it never did penetrate the market as I thought it could, I hold that it's still too time consuming for the average user).

I was a little thrown off at the sight of the required reading for this course.  Doesn't quite fit the mold of the traditional textbook.  Upon reading it though, I really enjoyed it.  I can already tell that this will be one of those books that I will keep on referring to for years to come.

In addition to the assigned material, I also managed to slip in a few videos.  The Mitch Joel video was from Tedx Concordia.  It's a bit older, and wasn't one of my favorites, but he's generally good for some little nuggets.  I actually had the pleasure of recording and editing his first book (Six Pixels of Separation) a few years ago, when he did an audio version of it.  He just released his new book (Ctrl Alt Delete), and it is on my back burner waiting for me to pick it up when I have the chance.

The other video came from McKinsey and featured Chamath Palihapitiya, one of Facebooks early employees.  Both of these parties always shed some good light on the realm of digital.  Some of the future technologies that are coming down the pipeline are going to fundamentally change the the world as we know it- and like most things, its going to bring a world of greatness and a whole lotta trouble.  Nevertheless, we are living in exciting times!