Being unpopular and winning
No fluff today, serious topic ahead, let’s get down to it with a lateral thinking stretch question:
Three ships are out at sea. All of them suffer catastrophic engine failure and are about to sink.
One ship is storing the wisdom in the world.
The other has all the money in the world.
And the final one has all the love in the world.
You can only save one. Which do you save?
One interpretation of this, as usual, at the end.
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The one about feedback
There’s one very valid school of thought that puts feedback at the center of everything. Customer feedback & opinions are core beliefs and the company builds almost exclusively on this.
This is called sustaining innovation.
It’s what happened when we moved from flip phones, shitty cameras and physical buttons to smartphones - high quality cameras and touchscreens. It’s a steady process that slowly improves everything (with notable “jumps”, like the iPhone).
There’s another thing called disruptive innovation.
It’s when customer feedback is valued, but not at the core of things. And no, don’t you dare tell me that Henry Ford quote (which apparently wasn’t even said by him).
It’s what happens when smaller players go against the status quo, develop a small market, grow it exponentially and eventually take over. It’s what happened with Netflix, Airbnb, Uber and many others.
The problem here is that when you’re growing you’ll constantly hear reasons why it can’t be done.
The company I co-founded is in the same boat. I wish I could count the number of times I heard “you can’t do that, media agencies control everything” or “it’s all just backroom deals, you can’t change that”.
For a long time, we took that feedback to heart and tried to fix those opinions rather than focusing on building our niche. That was our mistake. But because we learned from that and switched to implementing our own vision, we’re now slowly seeing reactions change to “… wait, can you really do that?”.
If you’re working in a place that’s a disruptive innovator, you’ll hear contrarian reactions all the time and you’ll definitely be sailing against the wind. You’re going to be unpopular.
However, if you figure it out, you’ll eventually change the market and become a sustainable innovator, but in a totally new landscape.
If you’re in a place that’s a sustainable innovator, things will be slower, but you’ll also be in the status quo, which means most people will agree with you.
There’s no right or wrong position to be in. But it’s important to understand where you are so you can act accordingly (or change positions if you’re not resonating).
There’s nothing worse than seeing disruptors acting like corporations or sustainers acting like disruptors.
If you want to read more on the subject, there’s a lot of content on the topic, but it all started from this book.
Answer: There’s no right or wrong answer. You pick what you feel you’re missing the most.
And fun fact, most of the people who disagree with this interpretation picked wisdom.