Seth's Blog

Getting a ridiculous behemoth (and two California gigs)

Many of you that missed out on pre-ordering the 800 page behemoth that I published late last year have asked for a chance to get one. Since you're the biggest sneezers of the ideas in my books, I thought I'd put together a simple fundraiser for the Acumen Fund (limited to the first 200 people). 

Visit this page and order a pre-set package of books from 8CR and I'll send you, at my expense, one of the last remaining copies of the Behemoth. (US orders only, please, because shipping costs so much).  I'll also make a $10,000 donation to Acumen in the name of those that get in on it.

ALSO! I've been invited to come to LA on March 16 as the opening keynote (program, tickets) for a day-long conference, and also to appear in Costa Mesa, CA on the evening of the 15th.

You can get your Costa Mesa ticket with a few books thrown in as a bonus by clicking here.

"We don't need to make it better"

Improvement comes with many costs.

It costs time and money to make something better. It's risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.

Which is why, unless there's an urgent reason to make something better right now, most organizations naturally don't volunteer to improve.

Operating systems, government programs, established non-profits, teachers with tenure, market leaders, businesses with long-standing customers--these organizations are all facing an uphill battle in creating a culture where there's an urgency to improve.

Just because it's uphill doesn't mean it's hopeless, though. One of the most essential tasks a leader faces is understanding just how much the team is afraid of making things better (because it usually means making things worse--for some people).

How to listen

Live interaction still matters. Teachers, meetings, presentations, one on one brainstorms--they can lead to real change. The listener has nearly as big a responsibility as the speaker does, though. And yet, Google reports four times as many matches for "how to speak" as "how to listen." It's not a passive act, not if you want to do it right.

If listening better leads to better speaking, then it becomes a competitive advantage.

Ask an entrepreneur leaving the office of a great VC like Fred Wilson. She'll tell you that she gave the best pitch of her career--largely because of the audience. The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.

Don't worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.

Pay back the person who's speaking with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.

Play back what you hear but in your own words, using your own situation. Don't ask questions as much as make statements, building on what you just heard but making it your own. Take what you heard and make it the foundation for what you are trying on as your next idea.

If you disagree, wait a few beats, let the thought finish, and then explain why. Don't challenge the speaker, challenge the idea.

The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.

Good listeners get what they deserve--better speakers.

Why do we care about football?

For someone outside the US, the visceral connection with football seems mysterious. You can understand a lot about the future (and past) of marketing once you understand how the sport turned into a cultural touchstone.

Tribes -> TV -> Money  -> Mass -> TV -> Tribes

Football as we know it started in colleges. It was an epic muddy battle, pitting one alma mater against another, a war-like, non-balletic battle that united (at a pretty elemental level) the tribes on each side. As it grew as a college sport, it became as much of a social event as a sporting one, with alumni and students finding connection around a game.

But if that's all it was, today wouldn't be the biggest day of the year for several industries. If that's all it was, you wouldn't be able to pick a fight merely by challenging the hegemony of football or the local team. We'd be spending as much time and energy on soccer or lacrosse or basketball, but we don't.

No, it turns out that, quite accidentally, football, more than any other sport, is made for television. It's better on TV than it is live. The combination of the play clock, the angles, the repetition and the opportunity for analysis all make it perfect to watch on TV. And perfect to run commercials on. TV and football grew up together, side by side. Instant replay and the thirty-second commercial, supporting each other. 

It's not an accident that the commercials are as much a part of the Super Bowl as the game. The commercials represent both the cash component of football as well as the cultural souvenirs that go with our consumption of the game.

Fifty years ago, a coat salesman paid $4,000 for the rights to film a game, and NFL Films was born. The decisions Ed and Steve Sobol made over the years turned the sport cinematic, amplifying the tribal origins but taking them much further. They used sound editing and shot on film, all to transform a game into a spectacle.

Then, the second great accident occurred: As football became the official sport of television, it generated billions of dollars in revenue. This revenue led advertisers to push for more football, which led to more television, which led to colleges transforming football from a small sideline into a cash cow of some focus, despite the fact that it has very little to do with the core mission of the institution.

People justify the unpaid (and dangerous) labor of college football players by pointing to all the scholarships. But the scholarships aren't for playing football, they are for appearing on TV. That's what pays for the system.

The media-football complex drives deep into childhood, with many kids fast-tracked from a very young age into the game (not soccer, not baseball, not physics) at some level because of TV and because of money and because of tribes. If football is part of what we stand for, then of course we're happy to have our kid be part of that. But what does it mean for football to be part of what you stand for?

No one stands for movies, or ice cream or double-entry bookkeeping. No, a sport has become a pillar of our worldview, a tribal and economic connection to our past and our future. We don't want to understand the history and the money and the happy accidents. We just assume that this is as it was and as it will be. 

Going forward, no other sport will ever have a run like this, because the TV-cash part of the connection can't be recreated. Mass TV built many elements of our culture, but mass TV (except for tonight) is basically over. 

The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don't point everyone to one bit of content, don't trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.

The cultural touchstones we're building today are mostly not mass, mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact. Without the mass engine of TV, it's difficult to imagine it happening again. So instead we build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.

But for next season... Go Bills!

A diet for your mind

It's Groundhog Day, which means that January is over. January, of course, is official diet book month, the time of year that formerly young, formerly thin people buy books in the hopes that by osmosis, they will magically become post-holiday skinny.

Now that this madness is over, perhaps it's time to invest in something you can change: the way you think. Here are a bunch of books, ebooks and recordings that can help with that: Diet books for the mind.

Controlling what you eat is an interesting challenge, but not nearly as important as controlling how you think.

Paracosms, loyalty and reality in the pursuit of creative problem solving

A paracosm is an ornate, richly detailed imaginary world. Whether you're a three-year old with imaginary playmates, or a passionate inventor imagining how your insight will change just about everything, a paracosm gives you the opportunity to hypothesize, to try out big ideas and see where they take you.

Managers at established organizations have a very hard time with this. Take book publishing as an example. Ten or fifteen years ago, I'd sit with publishing chiefs and say, "let's imagine how the world looks when there are no mass market books published on paper..." Before we could get any further, they'd stop the exercise. "It's impossible to imagine that. Paper is magical. Are you saying you don't believe in books?" (I heard variations on this from people as recently as a year ago.)

The emotional response is easy to understand. If one of the core principles of your business needs to be abandoned in order to act out the paracosm, it feels disloyal to even utter it. Sort of like asking your spouse if he's going to remarry after you die...

And yet.

The most effective, powerful way to envision the future is to envision it, all of it, including a future that doesn't include your sacred cows. Only then can you try it on for size, imagine what the forces at work might be and then work to either prevent (or even better, improve on) that future and your role in it.

It's not disloyal to imagine a future that doesn't include your founding precepts. It's disloyal not to.

For the one person who didn't get the joke

The fabled comedian is killing it at a club that seats 400. One guy in the back, though, isn't laughing.

Miles Davis was shunned by a few people in the audience, even at his coolest.

The theater critic at the Times might not like this play, the one that made people cry and sold tickets for years.

And just about every blog post and book listing collects a trolling comment from someone who didn't like it, didn't read it or didn't agree with it (or all three) and isn't shy about speaking up with a sharp tongue.

For those people, the message from the creator of the work is clear: "It's not for you."

Unanimity is impossible unless you are willing to be invisible. We can be unanimous in our lack of feedback for the invisible one.

For everyone else, though, the ability to say, "It's not for you," is the foundation for creating something brave and important. You can't do your best work if you're always trying to touch the untouchable, or entertain those that refuse to be entertained.

"It's not for you."

This is easy to say and incredibly difficult to do. You don't have much choice, though, not if you want your work to matter.

Customers who break things

2% of your customers don't get it. They won't read the instructions, they'll use the wrong handle, they'll ignore the warning about using IE6. They will blame you for giving them a virus or will change the recipe even though you ask them not to.

And not only that, they'll blame you when things go wrong.

If you do a very, very good job of design and UX and process analysis, you can lower this number to 1%.

But then what?

The thing is, blaming this group for getting it wrong helps no one. They don't want to be blamed, and they're not going to learn. 

The other challenge, of course, is that the 1% keep changing. If they were always the same people, you could happily fire them. But there's no way to know in advance who's going to get it wrong.

If you're going to be in a mass market business, you have no choice to but to accept that this group exists. And to embrace them. Not to blame them, but to love them. Successful businesses have the resilience to make it easy for them to recover. To make it easy for these people to find you and to blame you and to get the help they need.

Sure, whittle down the number. But the ones who are left? They're part of the deal.

Watching is not doing (confronting the spectator problem)

Talk shows, from Johnny Carson to Fresh Air, have always been about spectating. Comedy, TV, graphic arts, business leadership, politics--they've been sold to us as spectator sports.

Selling spectatorhood is pretty easy. It's safe and fun and easy. You hit the remote. You pretend you have power--the power to turn it off, to change the channel, to buy or not to buy. We've seduced the masses with a simple bargain, and even permitted the role of the spectator to move into the work world. Most people, most of the time, are told to watch, not to lead, to follow, not to create.

Waiting for breakfast in bed to be served is very different indeed than getting up early and serving breakfast in bed.

The spectators foolishly assert that if everyone was a doer, a leader and a maker of ruckuses, then there'd be no one left in the audience. As if those that do require an audience.

The alternative to being a spectator involves failure and apparent risk. It means that you will encounter people who accuse you of hubris and flying too high, people who are eager to point out the loose thread on your jacket or the flaw in your reasoning. The spectators in the stands are happy to boo, happy to walk out when the team is struggling in the third period, happy to switch if the bread or the circuses cease to delight.

Why on earth, they ask, would they want to be anything but a spectator?

And yet, those that have foolishly picked themselves, stood up, stood out and made a difference, can't help but ask, "and why would I ever want to be a spectator again?"

[More on this from fabled professor Jeffrey Pfeffer]

Owning vs. renting

You don't own attention or trust or shelf space. You don't even own tomorrow's plans.

It's all for rent, with a cancellation clause that can kick in at any time.

The moment you start treating the rental like a right, it disappears.

Beyond showing up

You've probably got that part nailed. Butt in seat, smile on your face. We often run into people who understand their job to be showing up on time to do the work that's assigned.

We've moved way beyond that now. Showing up and taking notes isn't your job. Your job is to surprise and delight and to change the agenda. Your job is to escalate, reset expectations and make us delighted that you are part of the team.

Showing up is overrated. Necessary but not nearly sufficient.

Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

[Of course, this post isn’t actually about airports]. 

I realized that I don’t dislike flying--I dislike airports. There are so many things we can learn from what they do wrong:

1. No one is in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down.
2. Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem. The TSA blames the facilities people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the user’s problem is the driver of behavior (as opposed to maintaining power or the status quo) things change.
3. The food is aimed squarely at the (disappearing) middle of the market. People who like steamed meat and bags of chips never have a problem finding something to eat at an airport. Apparently, profit-maximizing vendors haven’t realized that we’re all a lot weirder than we used to be.
4. Like colleges, airports see customers as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but they’ll still be here.
5. By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.
6. The TSA is ruled by superstition, not fact. They act without data and put on a quite serious but ultimately useless bit of theater. Ten years later, the theater is now becoming an entrenched status quo, one that gets ever worse.
7. The ad hoc is forbidden. Imagine an airplane employee bringing in an extension cord and a power strip to deal with the daily occurrence of travelers hunched in the corner around a single outlet. Impossible. There is a bias toward permanent and improved, not quick and effective.
8. Everyone is treated the same. Effective organizations treat different people differently. While there’s some window dressing at the edges (I’m thinking of slightly faster first class lines and slightly more convenient motorized cars for seniors), in general, airports insist that the one size they’ve chosen to offer fit all.
9. There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones. You can have a flight be cancelled, be strip searched or even go to the wrong airport. But all possibility for delight has been removed. It wouldn’t take much to completely transform the experience from a chore to a delight.
10. They are sterile. Everyone who passes through leaves no trace, every morning starts anew. There are no connections between people, either fellow passengers or the staff. No one says, “welcome back,” and that’s honest, because no one feels particularly welcome.
11. No one is having any fun. Most people who work at airports have precisely the same demeanor as people who work at a cemetery. The system has become so industrialized that personal expression is apparently forbidden.

As we see at many organizations that end up like this, the airport mistakes its market domination for a you-have-no-choice monopoly (we do have a choice, we stay home). And in pursuit of reliable, predictable outcomes, these organizations dehumanize everything, pretending it will increase profits, when it actually does exactly the opposite.

The long run keeps getting shorter

In the long run, we're all dead, sure that's still true.

But the other long run effects--in the long run, you get caught, in the long run, kindness wins out, in the long run, we learn about who you really are--all of those are happening faster than they used to.

The short run has always been short (and it's getting shorter still). The real change, though, is how short the long run is getting. 

Slow media

Slow media is patient. It's not on a deadline. It isn't measured in column inches. It can be calm instead of sensational, deep instead of superficial.

In the age of "Breaking news, Emmy nominations announced!" and 140 characters, it's sort of surprising to realize that we are also living in the golden age of slow media.

For years, on Sunday mornings, you could find me sitting in my driveway, recently arrived home from one errand or another, listening to Krista Tippett's extraordinary interviews on the radio. Thanks to the web, there's no need to sit in your car any longer, and Krista's groundbreaking approach is spreading. Spending 90 minutes in the studio with her to create this week's show was, for me, one of the highlights of my career. (download).

When there's unlimited shelf space allowing unlimited podcasts, which can be of unlimited length, the goal isn't to get the show on the air faster or to make it noisier. Instead, the goal, like the goal of a good book, is to say something worth saying, and to do it in a way that's worth waiting for.

The challenge used to be to promote your idea enough to get on the radio or get into the newspaper. Of course, along the way your idea was truncated, edited, misconstrued, amped up and dumbed down, because scarce media space often demanded this.

Today, the challenge is, as Krista has shown, to be insightful enough and patient enough to use the (unlimited) time to create slow media that people actually want to listen to. Not all people, of course, but enough. Not media for the masses, but media for the weird, for people who care. It might not be obvious media, or easy to understand media, or easily digested media, but that's okay, because slow media is not mass media. Slow media is not for the distracted masses, it's for the focused few.

One of the greatest privileges of publishing The Icarus Deception and V is for Vulnerable is that I've had the chance to talk with some amazing podcasters. And to do it slowly. With focus.

Go ahead and subscribe to a few. Slow media is good for us.

Ideal, average and outlier

Generalizations are the heart of marketing decision-making. When we look at an audience--customers, prospects, constituents--we make decisions on the whole based on our assumptions about the individuals within the group.

But are we basing those generalizations on our vision of the ideal member of the tribe, the average member or the outlier who got our attention?

It's easy, for example, to defend high-priced famous colleges if you focus on the ideal situation. The ideal student, getting instruction from the ideal professor and making ideal progress. No one can argue with this.

On the other hand, when we see the outlier (the person who is manipulating the system, or the one who is being harmed by it) it's easy to generalize in precisely the other direction, deciding that the entire system isn't worth saving.

And finally, it's tempting to rely on the average, to boil down populations of people into simple numbers. The problem with this, of course, is that if one foot is in a bucket of ice water and the other is being scalded, on average, you should be comfortable.

Before we start making decisions about markets, tribes and policy, we need to get clear about which signals we're using and what we're trying to focus on or improve.

On behalf of yes

Yes, it's okay to ship your work.

Yes, you're capable of making a difference.

Yes, it's important.

Yes, you can ignore that critic.

Yes, your bravery is worth it.

Yes, we believe in you.

Yes, you can do even better.

Yes.

Yes is an opportunity and yes is an obligation. The closer we get to people who are confronting the resistance on their way to making a ruckus, the more they let us in, the greater our obligation is to focus on the yes.

There will always be a surplus of people eager to criticize, nitpick or recommend caution. Your job, at least right now, is to reinforce the power of the yes.

A legend in my own mind

Everyone lives with self mythology.

The more important a memory is to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the more often we rehearse the memory. And the more often we relive those memories, the less likely it is that they are true.

Despite our shared conception that we are rational actors making intelligent decisions based on an accurate view of the world and ourselves, precisely the opposite is true. Your customers, your workers, you and I, we are all figments of our imaginations.

Understanding the mythology of your partner, your customer and your audience is far more important than watching the instant replay of what actually happened.

Exactly the same vs. exactly different

You will almost never find a case study or lesson that precisely fits the problem you're aiming to solve. You won't find a book that shows you what someone precisely like you did to solve a problem precisely like this one.

The search for the exact case study or the exact prescription is the work of the resistance, a clever way to stay safe, to protect yourself from your boss or your self-talk. If you wait for the perfect map before departing on your journey, you'll never have to leave.

It's also true, though, that you have never once had to solve a problem that is exactly different from what's gone down before. We'd like to romanticize our problems as unique, as the one and only perfectly difficult situation that is the result of a confluence of unrepeatable, unique causes.

Your problem is your problem, and it is like no other. But it's close enough to those that came before, close enough to the ones you've studied, that it probably pays to stop stalling and take the leap.

Interesting?

Is it interesting because it happened...

or because it happened to you?

If George Clooney sits next to you at a restaurant, that's interesting to you, no doubt, but only interesting to your friends because you're so excited. I mean, he had to sit next to someone!

Should we read your press release or come to your gallery opening or take a sales meeting because it's important, or because it's important to you?

Marketing is the art of seeing (and then creating) what might be interesting to more than our friends.

There's a circle of friends in our lives that care a lot about what we care about. The rest of the world? They mostly don't.

[Feel free to insert "important" and "urgent" as well. ]

Possession aggression

It's actually not that easy to give something substantial away. That's because accepting it means a change (in lifestyle, responsibility or worldview) of the person receiving it. It's stressful.

Far more stressful, though, is taking something away. Once a person or an organization comes to believe that, "this is mine," they erect a worldview around their possession of it. Taking it away instantly becomes personal, an act far greater than living without a privilege or object in the first place would be.

We care more about the change than the object or privilege itself.

With great power comes great irresponsibility

It's possible that Peter Parker was uninformed.

Organizations tend to view "responsiblity" as doing the safe, proven and traditional tasks, because to do anything else is too risky. The more successful they become, the less inclined they are to explore the edges.

In fact, organizations with reach and leverage ought to be taking more risks, doing more generous work and creating bolder art. That's the most responsible thing they can do.

Two people you might need in your professional life

An agonist. While an antagonist blocks an action, the agonist causes it to happen. Even more than a muse, a professional agonist might be exactly what you need to provoke your best work.

And of course, a procrastinatrix. Someone who's only job is to hold you accountable for getting it done, now, not later.

In a world with fewer bosses than ever, when we are our own boss, these two functions are more important than ever. If you can't find a way to do it for yourself, spend the time and the money to find someone to do it for you. Neither job is particularly difficult to do, but it's hard to do to yourself. Two more job titles for the future...

[Thanks to Sunny for the nomenclature.]

When a conference works (and doesn't)

When we get together with others, even at a weekly meeting, it either works, or it doesn't. For me, it works:

...If everything is on the line, if in any given moment, someone is going to say or do something that might just change everything. Something that happens in the moment and can't possibly be the same if you hear about it later. It might even be you who speaks up, stands up and makes a difference. (At most events, you can predict precisely what's going to be said, and by whom). In the digital age, if I can get the notes or the video later, I will.

...If there's vulnerability and openness and connection. If it's likely you'll meet someone (or many someones) that will stick with you for years to come, who will share their dreams and their fears while they listen to and understand yours. (At most events, people are on high alert, clenched and protective. Like a cocktail party where no one is drinking.)

...If there's support. If the people you meet have high expectations for you and your work and your mission, but even better, if they give you a foundation and support to go even further. (At most events, competitiveness born from insecurity trumps mutual support.)

...If it's part of a movement. If every day is a building block on the way to something important, and if the attendees are part of a tribe that goes beyond demographics or professional affiliation. (At most events, it's just the next event).

The first law of screenwriting is that the hero of a great movie is transformed during the arc of the story. That's the goal of a great conference, as well. But it's difficult indeed, because there are so many heroes, all thinking they have too much to lose.

What's it for?

If, seventy years ago, you asked Henry Luce, "What is Time magazine for?" he'd probably talk about setting society's agenda, capturing the attention of the educated and powerful and most of all, delivering the best weekly news package he could.

Today, the answer is clear. The purpose of the magazine is to make as much money as possible. Everything else is in service of that goal.

It used to be that the profit enabled the magazine to reach its goals. Today, the goal is to reach the profit.

If you ask a typical food service manager at a typical high school what school lunch is for, the answer is probably not, "to educate kids about healthy food and help them to make nutritious choices for a lifetime." No, the answer is probably, "to feed as many kids as fast and as cheaply as we can, given the limited resources we have."

And if you ask someone working at a kitchen gadget company what the latest item is for, the truthful answer probably has nothing at all to do with pitting an avocado efficiently, or making a good cup of coffee. The honest answer would revolve around ease of manufacturing, pleasing the rep and the store buyer and most of all, producing an item that sells in volume and turns a profit without too many people sending it back.

In most b2b situations, the answer is always the same, "to please my boss."

Sure, we're good at making up backstories to explain our actions, to craft the 'why' that's ostensibly behind the reason we do things. But c'mon. The answer to, "what's it for" is all about what drives the person who makes the non-obvious decisions. If you're always having to recalibrate your actions to match someone else's decisions, that's the real 'for'.

Fedex used to believe that they were in the customer service business, and that speed and reliability were the driving factor behind everything they did. Now, it seems, they are in the profit business. That the purpose of all of those people and all of those trucks and planes is to maximize profit. The rest is merely a means to that end.

I think maximizing near-term profit can be a productive goal, especially if that's what those you work with and partner with expect. I'm pointing out that the spin of substituting something loftier can truly confuse people inside and outside of your organization. And of course, when the only rudder you have is 'profit now,' expect that your long term prospects are in doubt, threatened by those with a different goal, one more congruent with their customer's needs.

Economics often trumps good intent, particularly at scale and over time. Decision-making power accrues to those that spend and make money, one reason that industrialization and time suck the art out of so many things.

Being clear about what we're doing and why is the first step in doing it better. If you're not happy about the honest answer to this question, make substantial changes until you are.

Understanding idea adoption (you're not a slot, you choose a slot)

In the last year, millions of people have bought a copy of 50 Shades. Here's the thing: they didn't all do it at the same time.

Some people bought it when it was a self-published ebook. Others jumped in when word of mouth started to spread, enough that it became a bestseller. Most people, though, waited until it was on the bestseller list, in piles at the bookstore and the subject of positive and negative discussion and even parodies. And a few people are going to buy it two years from now, after everyone else who was willing to read it already has.

Another example: Just about all of the people who read this blog have read one of my books, and yet, just about no one who reads this blog has read my newest book yet (less than 2%, surely).

This is what almost always happens. Individuals choose a slot based on what sort of leadership or risk or followership behavior makes them happy right now. Early adopters and nerds like to go first. But some people are early when it comes to shoes, or to mystery novels, or records, while others adopt early when it comes to political ideas or restaurants.

Most of the time, most of us choose to be in the slot of mass. The masses wait to see the positive reviews, or they monitor the bestseller lists. The masses know they have plenty of time, that they'll get around to it when they get a chance, and mostly, they are driven by what their peers (the early adopters, the ones who keep track of this stuff) tell them. "Why waste time and money on the wrong thing," they argue, with some persuasion. So they wait for proof. Social proof or statistical proof.

[Beyond mass: No, everyone is not going to sign up for your new online service or buy my new book. We're talking about pockets of people, micro markets. But within those micro markets, everyone is not the same. Within those micro markets, some people are itching to go first, and plenty of people are waiting patiently to get it right.]

The glitch in the system is that many marketers obsess only about the launch. They put their time and money and effort into the first week on sale, and then run to work on the next thing, when in fact, the mass market, those that choose to wait for more than, "it's new!" haven't decided to take the leap yet.

Perversely, marketers look at what typically happens after the launch and say, "it's not worth sticking with this, because stuff that doesn't take off right away rarely does." And the reason? Because it was abandoned by the marketers who introduced it and then ran off to play with the next shiny object. It's self-fulfilling.

The fact is that almost all the profits of the record and book businesses come from the backlist, from Pink Floyd and Dr. Seuss. Apple sold almost all of its iPhones in the months after each launched, not the first day. Because that's what the market wanted. The exception that proves the rule: The Super Bowl only happens once a year, and it's just about the only time that everyone does everything at the same time.

I don't think the job of the marketer is to encourage people to jump from one chosen slot to another. I don't think it's worth the time or the energy to get someone who is comfortable with mass to suddenly turn into an early adopter, at least for today. Better, I think, to live in and work with and embrace your market, to go where they are, not to pressure them to change their habit.