There’s a lot of pressure to make things dumber. Better to make it dumb than to have someone simply walk away, apparently.
With so much to consume, and an unlimited amount to learn, there’s a race to make knowledge into a checklist item. Freon gas! Large language model! Coefficients! Many people just want to say a magic word and move on.
Of course, if we dumb things down, they become dumb.
This is not the same as simplifying concepts before adding nuance.
Four year olds easily learn to speak, and many kids in second grade can read. Not because they have a dumb version, but because someone cared enough to make the method simple.
There are simple explanations for quantum mechanics and for auto mechanics as well. They simply take a while to understand well enough to teach them to other people.
Start with basic principles, go slow and build. No need to dumb it down. Simple it up instead.
They’re ungainly, they’re slow but they’re also majestic. Like an elephant for ice hockey.
After each period, when the ice is chopped up by play, the Zamboni rolls out and leaves behind a sheet of perfect ice. Cold, smooth and untouched.
It’s useful to acknowledge that the same service is offered to each of us, every night. We wake up in the morning with a freshly smoothed-over day in front of us.
Our intentions determine our first few moves, the way we’ll engage with today’s ice. And those moves often lead to the next ones, and on and on, until the day is over.
Add up enough clear ice days and the pattern becomes set.
There are lights, camera and action, but mostly there’s the unreality of making it fit.
Happily ever after, a climax at just the right moment, perfect heroes, tension, resolution and a swelling soundtrack. Every element is amplified and things happen right on schedule.
Consume enough media and we may come to believe that our life is carefully scripted, and that we’re stars of a movie someone else is directing.
This distracts us from the truth that real life is more muddled and less scripted. There is no soundtrack. We’re actually signed up for a journey and a slog. Nothing happens ever after. It’ll change, often in a way we don’t expect.
We have no choice but to condense a story when we want to film it. Our real story, on the other hand, cannot be condensed, it can only be lived. Day by day.
Points aren’t just for games. Points are how we keep score and decide what to do next. Pick your scorekeeping wisely.
Too much focus on the score can bend us or break us, pushing us to engage with too much focus and without regard for balance.
And our attachment to obvious points strips us of our agency and independence.
If it’s subtle, variable and up to the user, the uncertainty can amplify our insecurity. “Wear festive clothing,” is an unwelcome line on an invitation, because the point system is unclear. How do I fit in? How do I not lose, or even win?
On the other hand, if the points on offer are industrialized, transactional or predictable, it quickly dehumanizes us into profit-seeking automatons. But at scale, this sort of easily communicated metric is common.
The word ‘jerk’ describes what happens to a human who is controlled by an assembly line (or a horse by a whip). A visitor to the first Ford assembly line was amazed at how the stopwatch and the pursuit of humans-as-a-resource mindset was turning people into puppets.
I figured a letter sent out on such a Tuesday better be full of delight. Luckily, today we have the marvelous Lynda Barry with us. To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of her masterpiece What It Is, she answered a batch of my questions via the United States Postal Service…
No artist has had a bigger impact on my work, so you can imagine what this meant to me!
Once you decide to write a book about strategy, it raises the bar for having a strategy for the launch.
People generally focus far too much on the launch of a project. Rocketships need a perfect launch, because just about everything after the launch is simply ballistic. But most of us don’t work at Cape Canaveral.
The world of books is a metaphor for a lot of industries, where old methods aren’t working well but persist in sticking around. First-time authors are often pushed into a cycle of hustle and scarcity, which leads to burnout and disappointment.
The alternative isn’t easy, but it’s worth embracing. It can be effective in more than just a book launch.
Celebrate the true fans
The seductive promise of the book industry (or movies, or fashion, or any business that has “star maker machinery”) is that they will somehow introduce your idea to strangers.
It certainly worked for JD Salinger and even Joni Mitchell. But it hardly works that way now.
This is Strategy had a great launch, perhaps the most successful book I’ve done in years, because 1,000 people showed up first and made a difference. This opened the door for others who wanted to be part of the conversation.
In their rush to reach strangers, traditional publishers ignore the opportunity to dance with people who are already excited. In my case, thanks to purple.space and the loyal readers of this blog, there were folks eager to offer me the benefit of the doubt.
Creating the launch package, with seven books, the collectible (and delicious) chocolate and the powerful strategy deck (check them out) gave this group of magical people first dibs on something special, as well as a chance to share it.
The first step to publishing a book well begins long before you decide to write a book.
Create the scaffolding for the idea to spread
Books aren’t unique, but the math is particularly compelling: They never achieve any of their useful goals in the first week. A network TV show used to get all of its viewers the first and only time it ran. A book, on the other hand, is worth writing if people are reading and talking about it years later.
The launch is a chance to model that behavior. If the launch simply focuses on getting the word out, it’s likely that the word will fade over time. But, if people talk to one another as part of what you’re doing, they’re more likely to continue to do so.
Last week, in hundreds of cities around the world, readers came together to talk about strategy. Not about my book, but about their strategy and how they can improve it. More than eighty bookstores stepped up to volunteer their spaces, and the book became a catalyst for conversation. Getting a copy wasn’t the point–talking about the work to be done was.
Ignore false proxies
How many people liked that post on Instagram? How did the book rank on the Times list? What did the first reviewers have to say?
It’s so easy to see, tempting to manipulate, and, ultimately, pointless. The proxy of the Times list has been so manipulated that it’s now meaningless–and the work publishers and authors put into shifting their efforts into this antiquated measurement is distracting and ultimately wasted.
A false proxy is convenient, vivid and unhelpful. It’s like asking a programmer how many words per minute they can type. It might be useful to be a fast typist, but it doesn’t help you become a great programmer.
Normalize the idea
I did more than 80 podcasts that launched last week. (I’m grateful for the passionate people that power this medium, and delighted by the magic of our conversations). That might seem like a way to get the word out to promote a book, but that’s not really what’s happening. People don’t usually hear a podcast and then open their phones to buy a book.
Instead, a book is a chance to have a conversation. The conversation is the product, the book is just the catalyst.
When an author and publisher spend the time and effort to produce a book, they’re actually demonstrating a commitment and sending a signal that this is worth talking about. The conversations I did, though exhausting, were a foundation for the conversations I hope that others will have going forward.
Successful non-fiction books are now a souvenir of an idea that is spreading and worth understanding.
Abundance instead of scarcity
For four hundred years, the only way to get a book on a store’s bookshelves was for some other book to come off the shelf. There wasn’t enough room for it to be any other way.
Now, with online shopping and digital formats, there’s infinite shelf space. It’s “and” instead of “or.”
That’s one reason why the launch matters so much less than it used to–it’s not a useful proxy for shelf space any longer.
My publisher understands the new math. Instead of focusing on limited access and short-term measurements, the posture is to be promiscuous with the ideas and to weave together communities of practice and interest. The magic of an idea is that if I share it with you, we both have it.
My launch partner on the audiobook has a similar mindset. While the default online marketplace model is to hold search hostage, keeping a huge share of the proceeds in exchange for offering a scarce slot in their store, there are new options. Discovery doesn’t just happen in the online store’s search box. Since most of the readers seeking the book in the early days already know my work and can find this page, I can bypass this scarce resource and offer a reader and author-friendly alternative.
Abundance is generative, and it also gives us room for gratitude. The acknowledgments of a book are my favorite part to write, because so many people, people not mentioned on the cover, are involved in producing and delivering an idea of value. I don’t get to list all the readers, of course, or the people they talk to about the book, and that’s the real point of this post, and the book itself.
If you want to change a system, change the culture. And if you want to change the culture, it helps to create the conditions for people to step up, talk about it, and take action.
Periods were an extraordinary invention. It took thousands of years of writing before we settled on this simple convention.
The most direct way to improve your writing is to make your sentences shorter.
I was reading a magazine article yesterday and was rapidly losing interest. The topic appealed to me, but I couldn’t keep reading. Then I noticed that halfway through the first column, I was still on the same sentence.
We have trouble keeping that long a string in our heads at once.
Most immediately, you are the ancestor of the you of tomorrow.
That’s why we don’t spend every penny in our bank account, why we put leftovers in the fridge, why we earn a degree–it’s a gift to the you of tomorrow.
Each of us have a way of thinking about our ancestorhood.
The circle of now is how far into the future you’re hoping to make an impact. Do you care enough to invest in a thousand tomorrows? What will you invest in (or sacrifice, depending on your point of view) to receive in the future?
And the circle of us is how many people you’re considering in the actions you take today.
The most convenient, easiest and visceral choice is to make no choice at all. Keep your circles small, focused on pleasure and the short-term win. If we don’t think about it, this is what we might collide with. No friend at all to our descendants, including our future self.
When we’re at our best, though, we expand those circles, creating generative possibility for ourselves and those around us. Everyone feeds their circles, the opportunity is to make them bigger.
Sometimes, marketers, musicians or speakers dig themselves into a solipsistic rabbit hole.
They’ve heard their stuff before. They think everyone else has too.
So they bury the lede, look for new laughs and most of all, try to avoid boring themselves.
Which often leads to confusion or controversy or, most of all, a muddy message.
You’re not speaking up to entertain yourself. You’re here to teach the next group of people who need to hear from you.
Empathy in communication requires you to repeat the stuff that works as you continue to explore the next layer of what might work even better.
In the words of my late friend Jay Levinson, “Don’t change your story when you’re bored, or when your partner is bored, or when your team is bored. Change your story when your accountant is bored.”
In the words of a reader, the newsletter is “super-juicy this week.” I had the most fun sharing a bunch of Halloween links:
2. Spooky reading: I really don’t think you can go wrong with the classics. I love Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — as with many classics, they’re much weirder than you can even imagine. I also love short story collections — a big favorite of mine in recent years was Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories.
1. Over a quarter of a million people now subscribe to my newsletter.
2. I sold my next book:
These things aren’t unrelated: over the past decade, the newsletter has turned into a wonderful playground for me: a place where I can work out my ideas, share what I love, and show my work while I come up with the next thing…
Some problems are easy to solve, others are difficult, requiring a lot more labor, willpower, resources and coordination.
Some problems have simple solutions, while others are complex in what it takes to move forward.
The trivial problems are fun. They’re simple to solve and don’t require much effort. Yes, please, go solve them.
We’re tempted to focus on the problems that are complicated but apparently easy. Somehow, a tweet or a scientific paper or some other announcement is all that it will take to unknot this situation. Tempting, but unlikely. If all it took to solve an easy problem was telling people the solution, we probably would have solved it already.
The other temptation is to seek out problems that are difficult to solve and complicated to organize around. After all, a herculean problem like this is so hard that no one can fault you if you don’t succeed.
What truly matters, though, are the important problems. The ones that aren’t rocket science, but need a significant amount of guts, emotional labor and community coordination to solve. They’re here. Right in front of us. Simple but difficult. But worth it.
In 1983, an old article from the Harvard Business Review changed my life.
In 1960, Ted Levitt, a professor at HBS, wrote the most popular article in the Review’s history. Called Marketing Myopia, it described a different way of thinking about change and marketing.
I was a (very) young MBA student at Stanford and somehow got an interview for a summer job working as the assistant to Jim Levy, the CEO of Activision. At the time, they were the fastest-growing company in the history of the world.
Instead of meekly sharing my resume, I went in brandishing a copy of Levitt and HBR. I explained, with confidence, that Activision might be the Penn Central of their time, and they needed to be strategic in their approach to the market, broadening their focus away from the Atari console that accounted for what felt like 98% of their revenue.
He stood up to throw me out of his office. “Well, so much for that,” I thought.
At that moment, one of his VPs ran in with the Cashbox magazine bestseller list. Activision had 9 of the top 10 bestselling titles. The two of them ran down the hall to celebrate.
An hour later, Jim returned to his office, saw I was still sitting there, forgot why he was angry with me and offered me a summer job, one I ended up not taking. It didn’t matter, though, because I had seen the light.
I think Ted put his finger on something urgently important, and the lesson of the paper has stuck with me throughout my career.
This week, forty years in the making, Harvard published an edited version of my expansion of his idea, called strategy myopia.
I hope Ted would be pleased.
Strategy myopia is task focused. It’s based on a desire to get a guaranteed result for specified effort. It involves meetings and plans and powerpoints. Strategy myopia afflicts people who prioritize tactics over the hard work of finding a worthwhile strategy in the first place.
We can avoid it, but first we have to acknowledge it and discuss it.
I’m listening more than reading these days, and I find that a good audiobook can make a real impact on the way I absorb and learn from a book. It’s a once in a century sort of shift in this medium.
My new book is now available in audio. It’s not on Audible, at least not now. Audible has exploited their dominant position and the offer they make to authors is unfair and almost untenable. I’m not sure their monopoly is as secure as they hope though–all of us have a podcast app on our phones, and services like SupportingCast now deliver books seamlessly to a podcast app–at the same time they bring authors closer to listeners.
SupportingCast makes it easy for audiobook creators to produce updates and reach the audience after the book is published–something that’s impossible with a print book, and forbidden by Amazon/Audible.
I think we’re about a year away from the majority of audiobooks being narrated by AI. One more upgrade in quality and they’ll deliver a better, cheaper alternative than all but the most skilled narrators. Reading the new book cost me my voice for more than a month, but I wasn’t happy with the AI version of me, so here I am.
With each section, I asked myself, “Am I doing the reader a service?” Just as typography took over from calligraphy, I think it’s likely that the answer one day soon will be, “actually, the AI can do this with more clarity.” But as long as I had the mic, I was eager to do the best I could.
As always, AI replaces mediocre work long before it provides a realistic or better alternative to the nuance, passion and insight that a human brings. But the arc here is clear.
Thanks for supporting the work.
And Strategy Week continues on LinkedIn. Don’t miss these (if you come live, you can ask questions, but they’ll all be recorded as well).
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