Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn’t ask, “How much do I value this opportunity?” but “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?”
A method to not get stuck in your ways, or your career.
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown – Harvard Business Review
The other day, I tweeted that all emails should have an unsubscribe-button. It was a frustrated reaction to an overflowing inbox filled with persistent sales people and CC-conversations with limited relevance to me.
After giving this some more thought, it’s actually not a bad idea. Email is a moderately good communication tool, given that you use it the right way. Its downfall is that its efficiency relies on a third party to use it correctly. You can keep archiving, tagging, filtering and searching – but if someone else decides to start emailing you with things that you don’t want, it’s still a losing battle.
Since we seem to be stuck with email as a standard, what could be done to improve it? Perhaps the introduction of a mute button. Gmail seems to have had(?) an option earlier, although it used a work-around where it just filtered out the emails and skipped the inbox. That is not fully addressing the problem since it gives the impression to the sender that you’re still on – and should be reading – the thread. This could lead to even more emails with “didn’t you see this?”-messages.
Instead, a nice way would be to simply mute on two levels – a conversation level and a person level. On the former, it would remove you from To/CC entirely and send a message to the thread saying;
“Thanks for including me in this thread so far, but I believe the discussion has reached the stage where my participation is no longer needed.”
Or something like that. Something nice, anyway. It is important with the feedback to the sender to manage expectations.
Muting on a person level is of course a little more complicated. Muting someone’s email address entirely can of course by gamed by creating aliases and so forth, but it would nevertheless be a better solution than we have today.
Sales people often email without having a prior confirmation of interest from the recipient. I think once is fair game – sometimes they are offering something interesting – but on the third or forth time, it gets tiring. It simply isn’t reasonable that anyone should have the right to email me several times if I do not wish to receive his/her emails. So you would mute them, if this continued.
Again, it would notify the sender that this has happened, and then the channel would be blocked for further interaction. This should, if nothing else, make the sales people more careful about what they send since they don’t want to be muted straight away. That would be a good thing since it puts the power back where it belongs – the receiver of the emails. The person who is spending their own time managing the flow of information coming in.
Gmail seems to be the most suitable industry player to try to change this – as a labs extension if nothing else. Or perhaps there is already something like this out there? If so, please let me know in the comments.
Reporter: Did you ever think that the lessons you first learned on the stage of an improv comedy theater in Chicago would pay off later in life?
Bill Murray: It pays off in you life when you´re in an elevator and people are uncomfortable. You can just say, “That’s a beautiful scarf.” It’s just thinking about making someone else feel comfortable. You don’t worry about yourself, because we’re vibrating together. If I can make yours just a little bit groovier, it’ll affect me. It comes back, somehow.
I often read references to legacy companies that repeat the same mantra at all their trade conferences, thought pieces and future predictions: we need to find new business models.
Since I never went to business school, I’m sort of stepping out on a limb here. But it seems to me that a business model consists of one or several streams of revenue. The combination of these it what constitutes the business model. Therefore it isn’t necessary to have multiple (or even new) business models, in plural, but rather to try to change the ratio or composition of the revenue streams that your model consists of.
Whether I have the terminology right or not, I think there could be a benefit in thinking about the problem in a more granular way. Coming up with a completely new model, seems big and overwhelming. Finding a single, small, new revenue stream is manageable – although it doesn’t instantly solve the issue at hand. It is more or less the difference between making big changes slowly, and making small changes all the time.
When searching for a new business model for a company, one must also be honest about the possibility that there simply isn’t one. Constantly searching for a new model, almost like looking for a paradigm shift, is tiresome and difficult. If there isn’t a new model around the corner, it could also overshadow the work with changing the ratios and tweaking the existing revenue streams. Finding and improving smaller parts of the puzzle. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, although in practice I think they often are.
There are industries going through substantial paradigm shifts in terms of product fit and consumer expectation. Assuming that their business model can go through the same shift could end up being a wild goose chase. And it could hinder these industries from being temporarily sustainable as the market changes, yet again.
A very solid walkthrough of parameters to consider when creating platform companies. I wish there was more blog posts like this.
I changed my Tumblr theme as the last one didn’t differentiate well enough between quotes and my own writing. Also added an AMA which could go either way, I suppose.
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