Below Belief

I wish there were a way that blog posts could make their way effortlessly from brain to screen without the confounded, intermediate typing step. For one thing, typing slows down thinking. And for another, I’d get a lot more sleep.
So I was thinking yesterday how business organisations never learn anything. This is true on a number of levels. The main level is that as people come and go inside an organisation they make discoveries, learn things about how the business works but when they go, it goes with them. They are never encouraged (or paid) to document in any meaningful way what they learnt and the business ends up effectively subsidising their personal education (teaching them how to fish) rather than furthering it’s own aims. In general the business pays to relearn this stuff, next time there’s a “disaster” which needs it.
On other levels, from year to year running the business we all learn things – as specific issues come to the fore, get resolved, then go away again. And similarly we fail to record them – so that when a similar issue hits us, we have no way except to scrabble for an old document or spreadsheet or email long-forgotten on a disk – which may inevitably have been deleted by accident the week before we need it.
My point is there’s no ritualised capturing of this valuable “secret sauce” – the combination of all of the learned lessons is what lets the business succeed and yet we don’t ever incentivise (or even recognise as valuable) recording it. It’s the essence of short-termism, fuelled mostly by peoples’ fundamentally short-term personal interest in the business.
It’s true that business systems (normally involving technology) are able to begin to capture some of the learned lessons – and a lot of the lessons we learn are common to all businesses so there are already well defined ways of storing best practice (like GAAP accountancy or CRM systems etc). The systems stand a good chance of outliving most of the people but even so, this means of information capture is still decidedly short-term, definitely fragile.
This differs quite a lot from evolution. With your average single-celled organism, evolving gradually over a long period of time, you have the very essence of “knowledge capture” happening for all to see. Every time a “discovery” is made (albeit in this case fairly randomly, guided by natural selection) it is wrapped up and kept as part of the very fabric of the cell (“business”) so that it can benefit the future generations and let them worry about better, newer discoveries… Each generation is continually and smoothly building on the foundation left for it by the previous one – free to get better and better, more and more suited to surviving (“making a profit”)
Anyway, obviously the time-scales are somewhat different and it’s not entirely analogous but it got me thinking about ways to make your average business a little bit more evolutionary.
And on a related but tangential topic, would it be conceivable to build a truly evolutionary business? In my mind this involves basically removing people from the equation (in itself a good thing as far as I’m concerned) – other than to oversee it. So the question is this: could we conceive of an online system (technology) which could evolutionarily (if that is a word) adapt itself into a profitable position using nothing more than content, links, PPC, natural search. One that instantly comes to mind is an evolutionary algorithm for PPC bidding which could self-adapt. It’s an interesting thought experiment on which I shall ponder some more…

Below, more on the long tail from Seth:
What are we doing about it?
You can either help people find what they want on the long tail (google)
Or let people sell on the long tail (ebay)
Or let people advertise on the longtail (google)
Or help people make choices about products on the long tail – comparison sites
What about arbitrage on the long tail?
Trading on the longtail? Measuring the longtail? Viewing the longtai? Data mining on the long tail? What about putting buyers and sellers together without making them sell through you? How do you make money?
Helping companies manage with the longtail – stock, logistics, trends?
The longtail for groups interested in getting together – social sites and dating
Thinking…
———— from Seth:

(Almost) everyone wants choice
Choice makes some people stressed and unhappy. But it also makes lots of people happy. And now people have the choice
By itself, a bias for choice is interesting but not particularly surprising. What’s surprising is the magnitude of this desire. My favorite example is the comparison of a typical Barnes & Noble store with Amazon. If you examine the sales of the 150,000 titles in a big store, you’ll see that they account for perhaps half of Amazon’s book sales. In other words, if you aggregate the millions of poorly selling titles on Amazon, they add up to the total sales of all the bestselling books in the physical world put together.
Another way of looking at it: More people watched more video on YouTube last week than watched the top ten shows on network television.
Another way: A quick look at your grocer’s beverage aisle will prove to you that Coca-Cola is no longer the most popular soft drink in the country. The most popular soft drink is “other”: none of the above.
The mass of choices defeats the biggest hit.
This curve shows up over and over. It describes travel habits, DVD rentals, and book sales. Give people a choice and the tail always gets longer. Always.
The Long Tail has been around forever, but only now does it really matter. That’s because of several trends working together:
a. Online shopping gives the retailer the ability to carry a hundred times the inventory of a typical retail store.
b. Google means that a user can find something if it’s out there.
c. Permission marketing gives sellers the freedom to find products for their customers, instead of the other way around.
d. Digital products are easy to store and easy to customize.
e. Digital technology makes it easy to customize non-digital goods.
The question isn’t, “Is this real?” The question is: “What are you doing about it?”

From Seth
I think it’s time you put up a blog for internal use.
Use a password if you like.
Use it as an internal diary, a way of tracking each day so that a month or a year from now, you can look back at where you were and how you dealt with the issue of the day. Even if no one else on your team reads your blog, the act of creating it will be worthwhile.
Perspective is worth a lot more than it costs.
I’ll let you know how it goes

Go and look at http://www.freerice.com
They’ve managed to turn a simple word game into an advertising mechanism which is paying to give rice to needy people.
I don’t know if it’ll work, but look at the
exponential growth in action.