The African Enterprise (Punctuation, Cluetrain Manifesto, Openness)
Hi friends,
Greetings from Abuja.
Here's what I have to share this week:
Two questions on thought: From the Birth of Tragedy, I pulled two questions:
What influences hold sway over our thought and how long do they maintain sway?
When does the matured mind throw off these fetters?
The first question implies that our thoughts are strongly influenced by context, experiences, other people, the general current of thought at the time, and prejudices. The second question then seeks to know and understand when we're able to sidestep these influences.
With the essay, I think through answers to these questions. I write about these influences as the hypnotizer to whose direction all thoughts bend, what maturity is and what it means for throwing them off, and why these questions are important.
Our- Strong Features bias: Features, especially strong ones, have been the basic rubric of Identification. Whether in classifying creatures, assessing people, or making product decisions, strong features provide a conceptual framework to ease decision-making.
We use strong features because they're reliable. Until they're not. Like the Black Swan sighting described in Nassim Talab's Black Swan, the problem with relying on strong features is that it forces us to decide, conclude, based on the things we know with little regard for those we don't.
Strong features encourage, force us even, to decide based on preconceived biases. They propagate exclusionary behavior that can cause bad, maybe expensive, decision-making.
So, Why do we have a bias for strong features? What do we do about it?
Coolest things I learned this week
Punctuation and Good Manners
In Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss, Punctuations are described as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. They’re the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
Punctuations help provide a sense of direction for the readers. Using them is compared to having good manners as they ease the way for others without drawing attention to themselves.
Actually, the word "punctilious" (which means attentive to etiquette) comes from the same original root word as punctuation.
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The Cluetrain Manifesto - Markets are Conversations.
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
The Cluetrain manifesto is a business theory developed by Rick Levine, Christopher, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger and was first published in 1999. It examines the impact of the internet on marketing, and its central idea is that markets are conversations.
According to this manifesto, the internet completely upended mass marketing. While traditional marketing used to solely be about broadcasting a message that would reach the largest number of people; marketing today, on the internet, is more about conversing than broadcasting.
The internet provides a platform for consumers to have conversations about the products that have been released and what their expectation is for that relationship to continue. With this platform, the onus then rests on the company to join the conversation and listen in on what may be the last chance at a conversation they will have before the consumers move on to a more conversation-friendly environment.
The Cluetrain manifesto is divided into several theses that go in-depth on the conversations, the response of companies, and new market expectations.
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Openness vs Ownership
One of the rules of the new age outlined by Jeff Jarvis in What Would Google do is that Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.
So what is it about openness that makes it an ingredient for success in the 'New Age"?
An often under-emphasized point about new ideas is that the whole purpose is to share them. That act of sharing in no way diminishes it but actually serves as a form of refinement process. And in fact, during that process, connections can then be made which could be crucial in bringing that idea to life.
Ownership, on the other hand, can turn out to be a way of building fences around ideas. A stumbling block for execution in an Age of implementation. For example, vague patent thickets block the progress of people on a path to execution.
As can be illustrated by a Laffer Curve (which explains that beyond a certain point, higher taxes yield less revenue), beyond a certain point, stronger ownership generates less innovation as it discourages idea-sharing and creates barriers to entry.
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Baumol's cost disease
Named after economist William Baumol, This concept explains his realization that innovation in one sector can cause an increase in the cost of products or services in another sector if the latter experiences less innovation.
This cost disease is also known as the Baumol effect and it implies that rising productivity (innovation) in the manufacturing sector of the economy would push up the cost of labor-intensive services as more innovation in the manufacturing sector would allow it to cut prices and raise wages while labor-intensive services would have no option but to raise prices to cover cost.
For example, the cost of cars got cheaper with Henry Ford's assembly line. The line became an innovation that allowed car manufacturers to produce more cars at a lower cost – so, they can afford to lower the price of cars and also increase the wages of workers. On the other hand, a labor-intensive sector like schooling can only cover the cost of paying teachers more and expanding by raising tuition.
Hence, in a world with rapid technological progress, the cost of manufactured goods such as cars, phones, computers, and so on should be expected to fall while the cost of labor-intensive services such as schooling, healthcare, childcare, fitness, and so on should be expected to rise.
That’s it for this week.
If you have any thoughts or questions, hit reply and we can have a chat. And if you enjoyed it, share it with friends.
Till next week,
Kelvin