The Seven Dimensions of Positioning

September 21, 2010 By

I don’t like reinventing the wheel, so for months now, I’ve been trying to reconcile everything I know about traditional business (think Peter Drucker and the Harvard Business Review) with all the seductive ideas I’ve been learning from the Lean Startup movement (and I’ll admit I am simultaneously attracted to, and wary of, those ideas). Some instinct led me to focus on a single word: positioning.

It seemed to be the key word, and I think my instincts were correct. I’ve concluded that positioning, defined in a 7-dimensional way, is the single most important word in business. So what is positioning? It is a generalization of the idea of product-market fit. It is the controlled, but not deterministic, crossing of a threshold beyond which the business suddenly seems to come alive and “work.” The emotion changes from depressed to excited. The energy changes from languid to explosive. The rhythms change from weak and uncertain to harmonious, vigorous and steady. Positioning happens when a business has an “Aha!” moment, and discovers identity, profitability and sustainability.  The business has found its groove and tempo (the business word for tempo is clockspeed) Positioning involves throwing seven firing switches from “Off” to “On” position and all 7 cylinders firing steadily enough that anyone in the business can take a real vacation without everything going to hell. [Read more…]

Cricket as Metaphor

September 14, 2010 By

I am rather surprised that the game of cricket has never gained popularity as a comprehensive metaphor for work, life and business. I don’t mean localized figurative metaphors like “on a sticky wicket” (tricky situation) or “bowled over” (fell in love/was caught by surprise). I mean a broad, coherent conceptual metaphor. The way American football is sometimes seen as a metaphor for industrial organization, soccer as a metaphor for reactive and opportunistic “network” styles of decision-making, and basketball as a metaphor for an artistic, Zen-like approach to life.  I think I know why this has been the case, and why it might change in the near future.

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King Gustavus’ Folly: The Story of the Vasa

September 8, 2010 By

Guest post by Jim Anderson

In my life, new product ideas are always showing up. However, whether we’re talking about new products or just new ideas, if too many people get involved in making them “better”, the whole thing can fall apart. Perhaps a story would help me to make my point.

(This is a guest post by Jim Anderson of Blue Elephant Consulting. Click here if you are interested in guest posting.)

My favorite story of what can happen when you let too many other people get involved in designing a solution has to do with a boat. Maybe I should say this more clearly: it has to do with a ship that was created a long time ago in Sweden.

(Picture by Javier Kohen, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0)

Morning is Wiser Than Evening

August 30, 2010 By

If I had to summarize my life philosophy in one phrase, I would pick the Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening. The phrase appears in many Russian folk-tales. I used to read these avidly as a kid. The world of Ivan the youngest of three sons, Vasilisa the beautiful and my favorite, Baba Yaga the witch, who rode around on a stove, is a sad and pensive one, but one you yearn to visit. Morals are careless afterthoughts. Russian folktales  are primarily impressionistic little gems that create a mood more than they tell a story. If you read the stories, you get a sense of where Chekov got his more grown-up inspirations. Chekov is, to me, the quintessentially Russian writer. I’ve read some Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but neither captures what I imagine the Russian landscape to be like, the way Chekov does.

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Interested in Guest Posting on Ribbonfarm?

August 25, 2010 By

This is a call for guest posts. Interested? Read on. The open-mic stage is officially open.

Over the three years that this blog has been in existence, I’ve rarely had people guest posting. Just 4 guest posts by my count. You can view the map of the  Guest Post trail here, and start browsing here.  It’s a rather eclectic bunch: George Gibson did a review of Predictably Irrational, Marigo Raftapoulos talked about video gaming in business, Dorian Taylor talked about his own take on the lean startup movement and Michael Michalko posted about how geniuses think.

I figured it’s time to get the guest posting thing a little more organized.

This is quite a demanding audience to write for.  But if you are up for the challenge of performing for a very tough-to-please and scarily knowledgeable crowd  (but one that is very generous with praise when it is pleased), and have something stimulating to offer, I am open to contributions.

You get noticed by a significant and high-quality audience (currently around 2300 regular RSS subscribers and about 17,000 – 20,000 visits a month), and if you can impress this lot, given the caliber of comments, you’ll get some high quality readers for your own blog and/or personal connections.  And I mean high quality. I am routinely surprised to find that some high-level exec or well-known entrepreneur, writer or professor has read something on this blog (personal high point: William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and cyberpunk pioneer, tweeting my Container Shipping post; can’t find the damn tweet now; should have bookmarked it. I doubt he’s a regular though). Scares me a bit, I admit, and I basically try not to let it worry me.

Rule #1: No purely commercial stuff or blatant self-promotion.

Rule #2: Your contribution has to be “Ribbonfarmesque.” If you don’t know what that means, spend some time reading stuff on the site.

Interested? Just cut-and-paste your contribution into this contact form. Or if you prefer, use the form to send me a proposal and if if I accept it, you can email me the thing as an attachment.

And please forward this to others who might be interested.

Venkat

p.s. In case regular readers are wondering why I am soliciting guest posts now, two reasons. First, I’ve got a VERY busy few months coming up and second, after years of wondering whether this blog has a distinct identity separate from my own writing voice, I’ve finally concluded it does. There is definitely a “Ribbonfarmesque” way of seeing the world and thinking/writing about it that many others share (the term was actually coined by a reader to describe somebody else’s work, so I am not trying to slap my brand on others’ styles!).

The Greasy, Fix-It ‘Web of Intent’ Vision

August 17, 2010 By

The Web of Intent is a term that’s starting to get tossed around a lot, and I’ve gone from being wary about it to believing strongly in it. I was introduced to the term by Nova Spivack about a year ago and was initially skeptical. Could Web ADD be reversed? Can technology give us a true knob to allow us to tune our engagement anywhere from ‘distracted’ to ‘laser focused’? From knee-jerk reactive to coolly deliberate? Actually that’s how I think of the concept: a technology model that gives users this control knob to manage their online experiences:

The evidence is slowly starting to roll in. This conceptual knob can be created through a generation of “Intent” technologies. What’s more, this knob is what will likely save the publishing and media industries.  It will also save our brains from getting fried, and create a new dynamic in the ongoing disruption of all types of information work.

As I thought more about some of the core ideas (see Nova’s posts What’s After the Real-Time Web? and The Birth of the Scheduled Web), I started to understand the power of the model.

This is where I am placing my bets. Not the 3D Web, not the “Mobile/Touch Web”, not the “Internet of Things” and not the “Semantic Web.” Those are important, but secondary. I am going all-in on the “Web of Intent” as the next main act that will reshape the Internet. As I’ll explain later, it is a gritty, greasy, roll-up-sleeves, fix-it vision, that is emerging in response to actual problems, as opposed to a vision born out of new possibilities (combined with the smoking of illegal substances).

So here you go: my primer on what the Web of Intent actually is, in terms of user experience (UX), concepts and technology. We’ll need to start by reframing what Web 2.0 actually is.

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Cultural Learnings of Blogosphere for Make Benefit Glorious Blog of Ribbonfarm.

August 15, 2010 By

I found a couple of good blogosphere conversations that took me far off my usual reading routes this week. It started with an article about whether language influences culture, Lost in Translation.  Here’s the sort of insight the new research offers:

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

This is Lakoff -Sapir-Whorf hypothesis territory so if you are interested in backtracking, you may want to read an old post by me, Sapir-Whorf, Lakoff, Metaphor and Thought. My online wanderings this week were sparked by two posts in this general cultural territory. The first is about a fascinating 19th century Algerian leader, Abd-El-Kader, who I’d never heard of. The other is a conversation about the use of Twitter in the Black community, sparked off by Farhad Manjoo of Slate (which was pretty much universally slammed), a subject I’d never thought about. Here’s the tour. Warning: severe online wanderlust ahead.

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How to Take a Walk

August 9, 2010 By

It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was taking a walk. There were people returning from work, people going places with purpose-laden bags, people running, people going to the store, people sipping slurpies.  But nobody taking a walk. Young women working their phones, but not taking a walk. People walking their dogs, or pushing a stroller, with the virtuous air of one performing a chore for the benefit of another, but not themselves taking a walk. I was the only one taking a walk. The closest activity to “taking a walk” that I encountered was two people walking together and forgetting, for a moment, to talk to each other. The moment passed. One of them said something and they slipped back into talking rather than taking a walk.

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Down with Innovation, Up with Imitation!

August 3, 2010 By

Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a pervasive, unexamined assumption that originality is always a good thing. Copycats, by Oded Shenkar is a delightful little book that takes on a project that I strongly support: taking down the holy cow of innovation and extolling the virtues of imitation.  Ironically, it is one of the most original business books I’ve read in the last few years. It even manages to say something new about the business case everybody loves to hate: Southwest Airlines.

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Wanted: A Book Cover Designer for “Tempo”

July 28, 2010 By

Update: the book is published, cover and all. Adam Hogan did the cover.

I am at that dangerous stage with my first book project, Tempo, where I am going around telling people the manuscript is “95% done,” but with the last 5% threatening to take 50% of the time by the time the it is actually done. But still, with cautious optimism, I can report that I really do think I’ll get the book out by November, as I’ve promised. Which brings me to the reason for this post: I need a cover design. If you are a book cover designer and want to take a shot at it, read on. If you are not, but happen to know good book cover designers, please help me out by emailing along a link to this post, reblogging it, and so forth. Designers with no book-cover experience, you can still bid, but I’ll probably favor people with experience unless they ALL price themselves out of my budget. All bids due by August 10, 2010

9 Simple Rules

  1. My maximum budget is $1000. And I’d rather spend MUCH less upfront. I intend this book to recover my cash investment and start making money as soon as possible.
  2. You can bid for the job by emailing me your bid with links to samples of your work. Do mention how you found out about this job. Read the rest of this list first though.
  3. MY WEIRD OFFER: You can choose to bid for some mix of a dollar amount under $1000, and a per-copy profit share up to $1 per copy, on copies sold in the first year, up to a maximum of 3000 copies. So if I sell 500 copies in Year 1, and you bid $500+$1/copy, you’ll make $1000. If it becomes a runaway hit,  you make a maximum of $3500.
  4. Calibration: I have approximately 500 people signed up for the book release announcement/beta lists already. And this blog has 2000+ RSS subscribers, growing steadily. You decide what that means.
  5. I would prefer bids from the United States to keep the logistics and communication simple, but will consider bids from other countries.
  6. If you have never done book design before, send links to samples of your most relevant work. Adjust your bid downwards accordingly
  7. This is just an informal, non-binding, request for quotes (RFQ). If I pick your bid, we’ll try to figure out a deal and a mutually acceptable creative brief. If we can’t, I’ll move on to my second choice. And so on.
  8. I know many readers of this blog are designers. If you choose to bid, please don’t be offended if I don’t end up picking you. I appreciate your loyalty to this site as a reader, but my priority is to get a great design.
  9. Even if you are a big fan of ribbonfarm, please don’t offer to do it for free (I’ve received such offers before, but I can’t accept free work when I make money myself)

So if you’re interested, please email me your bid (dollar amount plus profit-share proposal) and samples to your work. Mention how you found out about the job.

All bids due by August 10, 2010.

If I don’t get enough good bids through this post, I’ll end up looking at the normal channels.