Once a company hits a plateau in its market share, the pressure begins to mount.
Investors want more of a return, shareholders want the stock price to go up. Managers pay attention to the metrics they’re held to, and the squeeze begins.
At first, the squeeze focuses on efficiency. Cut obvious costs without diminishing customer delight or the conditions that the employees work under.
That doesn’t pay off forever, particularly in competitive markets.
At this point, there are two options:
The first is to reengage with the market. Innovate. Create opportunities for customers to find more opportunities and value. Use the resources you have to make something better.
The other, which is far more common, is to squeeze people–imagining that they might not notice, and then, with full knowledge that they do, but betting that they don’t have much of a choice.
Diminish the quality of life for employees. Demand more, offer less. Increase stress and forget what the original focus of the organization might have been.
Raise prices but lower quality and portion size and service at the same time.
Fedex decided that answering the phone on the first ring, happily honoring their guarantee and bringing extraordinary service to customers wasn’t as important as increasing their bottom line. Phone trees, unattended email boxes and plenty of fine print all exist to squeeze a few more dollars out of their existing sales.
JP Morgan Chase actively chooses to maximize short-term profit, betting that customers are too entrenched to switch. They’ll invest in coal, amplify credit card debt and outsource whatever they can to increase their margins.
If you use either of these companies, or any of their peers, can you honestly say that they care more and deliver more value than they used to?
Cory Doctorow describes the monopolistic dead ends built into most corporate financing schemes. Enshittification isn’t the decay that comes from neglect. It’s the active squeeze, trading the path of better for the short-term goal of making a few more pennies.
When an organization races to the top, they’re very clear about what they’re doing. They’ll engage their team and the market in a mutual dance toward possibility and improvement.
But when an organization is focused on the squeeze, they know precisely what they’re doing, but will obfuscate and deny instead of admitting it.
I had no idea what “mad magazine autostereogram, cutecore” meant, but it was enough for Midjourney to create this:
Older generations have always been left out of the codewords and trends of the makers of pop culture, but the gatekeepers and lack of shelf space kept pop, popular. There are only 40 songs in the Top 40, only a few hit network TV shows.
Three things have changed:
The long tail means that there’s room for more. Always. As many as 25% of all Spotify songs have only been listened to a few times. The average video on YouTube is seen once a day.
AI generation of art, music, video and writing means that the pace of creation is going to grow exponentially.
Memetic identities, genres and codewords are easier for AI to begin with than complex images. And so, new genres multiply, get exaggerated, evolve and morph into new genres. It’s genetic material, run amok.
The end result is that pop is not popular anymore. It may never be again. The center was a moment in time, but the edges are now everywhere.
When we encounter a thoughtful critic, we need to quickly understand who is speaking to us.
If the work we made was intended for someone just like this, and they don’t like it, we need to do a better job next time. The criticism will help us understand how to improve.
But if the work we made wasn’t for someone with the hopes, needs and expectations of the person we’re hearing from, we can forgive ourselves (and them) by acknowledging who it’s for and why.
This is not the same as not working very hard. In fact, they’re very different.
We’ve been indoctrinated to avoid trying hard (too risky and emotionally fraught) and to resign ourselves to working hard (held up as a virtue).
People who work in productivity-focused jobs where they follow the manual work very hard. If you buy a Subway franchise, you’re buying years of hard work–the more hours you put in, the better your profits. If you work on an assembly line–making chocolate or writing code–the boss pushes you to work harder and harder.
On the other hand, there are projects where the outcomes are less certain and where the manual isn’t as complete. In these sorts of projects, we need to use our judgment and insight. We do things that might not work. There are few prizes for longer work, but plenty of upside for better work.
We’re surrounded by businesses staffed by hard-working people who have been trained to not try very hard. So they stick with the policy and avoid innovation, customer delight and connection.
Ironically, when it’s our turn to be the customer, we often seek out precisely the opposite. Humans are drawn to folks who care enough to try a bit harder.
Left alone, a cup of coffee will gradually cool until it reaches room temperature.
Stable systems regress to the mean. Things level out on their way to average, which maintains the stability of the system.
The same pressures are put on any individual in our culture.
Sooner or later, unless you push back, you’ll end up at room temperature.
(As I write this, the built-in grammar tool has made suggestions to every single sentence, pushing to make it sound less like me and more like normal.)
Here’s a useful writing breakthrough that has made a difference for me…
Set up an account at ElevenLabs. Create a custom voice by uploading some recordings of yourself speaking. It’s not perfect, but it’s eerily close.
Now, when writing an essay, a book or even a report for work, upload the text and have the site convert it to your voice. Download it to your phone and listen to the audiobook you just made as you walk around town or go for a drive.
You’ll probably notice things that didn’t come through when you were trying to edit your own work on the screen.
It’s also a useful hack for anyone writing a screenplay or dialogue. And perhaps it will be helpful for you in converting and then listening to documents that others have written.
Reading is a miracle, but our brains listen differently–especially to our own voice.
You’ll need to fix errors in the code. Adjust errors in measurement. Deal with changing conditions. Perhaps there are systems effects no one could have predicted.
If we begin a project with the high school mindset of getting a good grade (and avoiding the red check), then not only won’t we be eager to find bugs, we’re less likely to invest in projects that might not lead to flawless results.
On the other hand, if we accept that bugs are a useful part of the process, we’re much more likely to end up with a useful result.
“I’m done,” is not nearly as useful as, “this milestone has been reached, let’s go find some bugs.”
The work isn’t to pretend there are no bugs. The work is to eagerly seek out the most important ones.
Those are harsh words. They imply agency, responsibility and failure.
The response might be, “I did everything I was supposed to do.” Or perhaps, “What should I have done? I followed all the instructions.”
Agency and freedom go together. We have more choices than we want to admit. When Ahab decided to become a whaling captain, everything that happened after that was related to his initial choice.
What do we make? The answer is simple: choices.
Owning our choices is a celebration of our future agency. You don’t get yesterday over again, but you do get to make new choices tomorrow.
Even though yeast is far more reliable than it used to be, many bakers still proof it before investing the time and materials to bake a loaf of bread. The extra few minutes waiting for it to bloom is cheap insurance to avoid a failed loaf a day later.
If you need to be sure there are no pits in your chopped dates, it makes sense to avoid mechanically de-pitted fruit. Every single date has exactly one pit, and if you find it yourself, you’ll know you found it.
We can’t do every task ourselves, and we can’t test every raw material, particularly if it’s a destructive test like whether or not this glass is tempered.
The math is simple, but easy to avoid: What are the chances that the component in question might fail, multiplied by the cost to the project if it does. Compare this to the cost of the test and you’ll know what to do.
In my experience, we focus on the easy tests, without thinking hard about the real costs. Three shortcuts to avoid: Tradition, proximity to failure and the vividness of the rare cataclysm.
Traditional tests might distract us from the checks we ought to be doing.
Proximity to failure puts our focus on things at the end of the process as opposed to thinking hard about the underlying components and system failure.
And vivid failures are failures that get our attention, but loud and urgent aren’t the same as important and useful.
Consider the role of status in just about all human interactions.
It begins at a primal level–every species cares about access to food and resources. We share a prehistoric history of status based on strength. But civilization is about awarding status on something other than violence.
So there is the status that comes from being the breadwinner, the hunter, the matriarch.
Or the status that comes with age and experience.
We award status to spiritual leaders, peacemakers and selfless warriors.
And to beauty.
Status might be passed down through families. It could be formalized with Dukes and Empresses and other peerages (an ironic term, of course).
Lately, only in the last few hundred years, have we awarded status based on commerce. That people with access to money get a better seat, and the benefit of the doubt. And celebrity, a status that’s not possible without some sort of media to create that celebrity.
Like most things associated with media or with money, these two accelerated very quickly. Being famous for having a lot of money is a double sort of status, a benefit of the doubt based on sometimes unexamined foundations.
Not only are people trained to seek status, we’re driven to repeat the yearning we feel even after it’s acquired. The reason that more than enough isn’t enough for many is that status and the search for status can be infinite.
The adjudication of status roles is a critical role for anyone who works in culture or even in commerce. We award status without thinking about it, when awarding it is actually a critical part of our work and our future.
Awarding status isn’t new. It’s that we’ve forgotten we’re doing it, and why. Every interaction is a small negotiation about who matters more in this moment. Understanding that doesn’t make the system fair, but it does give us a choice about whether to reinforce it or to build something else.
Consider beginning the new year by subscribing to purple.space. It’s a private online discussion group that I started several years ago.
A practice keeps a promise. A community of people who support, respect and encourage each other makes it far more likely we’ll find our way forward.
Purple Space is a worldwide community of creators, leaders and the curious. There’s no hype, no selling, no dark patterns. Instead, a few hundred people come together on a daily basis to share and support their work.
Or perhaps build your own circle of support. Accountability, inspiration and commitment. We each have the tools to find our cohort.
Here’s to possibility. Find some people and build something great.
In professional fields, like law, medicine or accounting, it’s expected that you’ve done the reading. A professional has seen what has come before, understands the best practices and eagerly duplicates effective methods that have been shown to work.
As our understanding of marketing, management and tech has grown, there’s been a rise in intentionally naive wannabe entrepreneurs who decide that energy and authenticity are far more important than knowledge. That didn’t used to be a choice, now it is.
Sure, someone is going to win the startup lottery, but it probably isn’t going to be you. The good news is that there’s a lot to learn, all from easily accessible sources. It’s way less stressful to do it right than it is to do it over again.
Every year, on the first weekend of the year, it’s probably worth replacing the dried spices in your pantry. The best, freshest spices still taste like the spice that’s on the label, but they taste more like themselves.
That’s what successful brands and freelancers do as well. They relentlessly do the work to act more like themselves.
First, we have to figure out what we are, what we stand for, and what people expect.
An essential feature of every bottle is the neck. No neck, no bottle.
There are bottlenecks in every process, every project and every method. Something is limited. We can pretend that’s not the case and avoid the discussion. Or we can see it as an opportunity.
Successful organizations are good at embracing and working with their bottlenecks.
If you went back 45 years, the built world would be eerily similar–the clothes, the cars, even the haircuts.
Except you’d quickly notice that there were no personal computers and no smart phones. That for seven or ten hours a day, every day, people were interacting in real life, not with their screens. Many of us can’t remember what we did all day.
The same thing probably occurred after the adoption of electricity. We acclimate to the new normal.
What happens a year from now, when most of those ten hours have been transformed by AI? We probably won’t remember what it was like today.
If you buy an Ikea table, you’ll need 8 bolts to put it together. 7 is not enough.
This is a functional sort of ‘enough.’ It can be critical to our survival. “I have enough medication to last through this illness.” “We have enough food to feed our family.”
But this isn’t the stress that we often feel in social or financial settings. That’s the bottomless, n+1 habit of never having enough.
Our needs got hijacked and turned into endless wants. Marketers and adjudicators of cultural standing turned ‘enough’ from a functional requirement to a never-ending tactic.
The not-enough of the driven hedge fund bro in the Hamptons, or the not-enough of the person hoarding resources, or the not-enough of the generous but nervous host who finds a sort of fuel in worrying about being hospitable. The not-enough chronicled in magazines and social media accounts. It’s the not-enough of someone counting online metrics, and the not-enough of the athlete who doesn’t simply want to win, they want to break a record.
This is a choice, and it is simply about the story we tell ourselves. There’s no absolute measure, no certain number of nuts and bolts needed in the optional search for solace and status.
On the other hand, when we find the insight to choose what our enough is, the people around us often respond warmly and in kind.
Insufficiency isn’t a tool or an advantage. It’s a hack, a distraction and a place to hide. This is a choice, a simple one, one we can remake each day.
Perhaps this has happened to you: You’re at the reference desk of the library, with the answer to any question available–and you can’t think of anything to ask.
And there’s the vegetable blindness that occurs at a really good farmer’s market. After a few stalls, it’s hard to imagine what to cook.
Shortly after high-speed internet arrived, this mind-blanking set in for many people… you could look up anything on Wikipedia, listen to any song, read any recipe–and in that moment, our curiosity seemed to fade.
And of course, with Claude and other AI tools here, it’s now a worldwide epidemic. We can find information, get tutored, create code, build illustrations, narrate projects… a team of free interns, ready to give it a go.
We have the keys to the car, and it’s got a full charge… where are we going to go now?
On poison and high voltage wires, the label clearly informs us that this can kill us, right away. For obvious reasons, these are important labels, and generally quite effective.
On cigarettes, it’s clear that if you smoke long enough, you’re going to die, and probably not pleasantly. The warning labels haven’t been nearly as effective as taxes in curbing smoking, but they made the issue clear.
New York State just passed a law requiring labels on social media. Many of the tactics of online networks make people, especially children, unhappy, perhaps for the long term.
Perhaps by highlighting the addictive, manipulative features that cause the most harm, informed consent (or avoidance) will follow.
We probably want to avoid signs like this:
But I’m wondering if a simple, universal symbol could get the job done:
Not just similar. Cavendish bananas (the usual kind here in the US) are all clones, each from a tree grafted from a tree grafted, all the way back, from the first tree of the species in the UK.
There are problems with this.
Sure, the banana is the most reliable fruit. The banana marketing folks don’t have to worry about uniformity.
But the monoculture is fragile. When the virus that kills this species spreads, they’ll all disappear.
And there’s little room for innovation, for positioning or to be anything more than a commodity provider. It’s hard to tell a story about a better banana when bananas are all so obviously the same.
They seem like they’ll spread to everyone and stick around forever.
This almost never happens.
In order to spread to everyone, they need to move beyond the people who are looking for a new idea. And that happens when existing users have a powerful reason to tell their friends.
Not only that, but the idea has to solve a real problem for people who weren’t sure that there even was a solution to that problem.
And in order to stick around forever, there needs to be a generous lock-in, a reason to not only keep using it, but to not switch to the next thing.
The network effect plus stickiness almost never happens after the idea is launched. It’s about marketing (in the powerful, design sense) not promotion.
Under each post on my blog there’s a button that says RANDOM.
I’ll confess that reading posts I wrote ten or twenty years ago is often a surprise. I wrote each one, but I have no recollection of doing so.
We can no longer expect that others will experience an introduction to us and our work in the order we would like. Instead, we present a mosaic to the world, persistent tiles that add up to a whole.
The first difficult task is to consistently and persistently create one tile after another. Showing up to earn trust, attention and a voice.
If it takes three to five years for a project to gain traction, it probably doesn’t pay to start a project that the world knows it needs right now.
The challenge is picking something the world will need then. And the hard part is patiently and persistently sticking with it despite the fact that it’s not on everyone’s agenda (yet).
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is tomorrow.
Extraordinary organizations have this as their employee handbook. Resilient ones. Human ones that can thrive in the face of automation and AI. Organizations that are built on customer service, hospitality and flexibility.
Of course, this means you’ll need to treat your team with respect and offer them training and dignity. It means you won’t be able to simply write down every single step in the manual, or work as fast as you can to replace people with uncaring software.
The partner of UYBJ is “why?”
If someone asks a team member why they’re doing something, it’s not useful to train them to repeat the policy. The puppetry of “I’m just doing my job” is the opposite of UYBJ. And that means, “because I said so,” while convenient, might not be the best management style.
