One of my favorite concepts from all of those years studying biology was the concept of the niche. An organism or creature finds a spot where the competition isn’t too intense, and raw materials they can work with, and decides to set up shop. They work with their environment and find a place where they can be successful, or they die out. Sometimes the environment around them changes, and the creature needs to adapt or perish.
The same thing is true for businesses, economics, families,you name it- as it’s true for bacteria or lemurs. If you find a niche and can exploit it to your advantage, you have a strategy for success that will carry you far. That is essentially the whole basis for great books like “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Amazon Link) that talk about finding markets where the competition isn’t fierce, or just isn’t there yet- you have the ability to own the niche.
One way businesses achieve this is by creating their own ecosystems. Apple is brilliant at this, with iTunes and the App Store- it has created a whole economy that it owns. It lets others play in the sandbox, helping diversify the entire ecosystem, making it more robust, and letting others compete to fill in the niches of best song, or best movie or best work productivity App, all the while taking a percentage, like an agent, as owner of the ecosystem or world. Amazon has done this, as has Ebay. All of these ecosystems compete at points of overlap- like a town encroaching on an animal’s habitat- but for large swaths of the ecosystem, there is less competition and life goes on pretty happily.
Finding your niche is difficult for a lot of folks, in part, because it starts with the very hard question of who YOU are, what you do best, and what you love to do. Sometimes, we can fill a niche because we are perfectly suited for a job that’s available, but if it doesn’t make you thrilled or excited to go to work every day, how are you really going to have the heart required to maximize the opportunity day after day?
Another spot of friction is when you know your talents and strengths, how do you communicate those to others is a short, coherent, easy to grasp way so they can help you find a niche that works? Some people refer to this as a lobby or elevator pitch- what is your tag line that inspires other people to be interested in you and hire you?
For example, on Twitter, I am largely known as LD Podcast, for the podcast I’ve done about learning and learning disabilities. But the important part there is really the Learning part- that transcends people struggling in school or work with things like dyslexia and ADHD. I feel I’m all about learning and teaching, and trying to find the most effective ways to make your message clear. I read business books and marketing books because these fields are all about making messages clear in order to get someone to buy something. I take all these ideas and concepts and apply them to help businesses, medical education, and other clients/niche owners to make their ideas and talents more easily understood. When you understand, quickly, what someone or some business is about, you can quickly decide whether you need that service, and you can convey that information easily to others- making the idea a virus, as Seth Godin would say. The principals are the same whether we’re talking math facts for middle school kids or marketing plans for adults or social media tools- you’ve got to be able to make a case and sell your ideas for anyone else to understand them and do anything with them. And that, in a nutshell, is about good, precise communication.
Which brings us back to science. In science and technical writing, precision is really important. I’ve spent hours struggling over a sentence or two in an abstract, trying to get the exact language as concise and accurate as possible. Likewise, in law school, your ability to win a case or argument depends on how you use language to communicate your client’s position to another, and use supporting information to convince the decision maker you are correct. In business and marketing, you have to do the same thing- use language to convince someone your product or service solves a need or problem- maybe even one they didn’t know they had. (Just ask Ron Popiel, or read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s “What The Dog Saw“.)
In the end, it’s all about finding your unique niche where you can thrive. You need enough resources (which includes money and customers for business, often money and students for education) to make the most of the niche, and you have to be constantly willing to adapt and change with the environment. If you can’t adapt and evolve, you will likely suffer, decline, and possible even go extinct, or at least out of business.
It’s easier said than done of course. But the process starts and ends with you, not with the shiny new objects or social media tools or anything else. I’d love to be able to say Get Twitter and life will be perfect, but that’s not true. Like monkeys figuring out to poke a stick in a log to get food, it’s all about how you use that tool to its greatest effect that will bring you success, and it often involves experimentation, failure, and reinvention time after time.
I know my life is one great experiment. I think I know something, and that knowledge gets challenged. I can stick to my guns, or adapt to the new conditions. I have to apply what I know. In reading The Checklist Manifesto- How to get Things Right, they talk about two distinct kinds of mistakes we make all the time. There are errors we make of ignorance- we don’t know what we don’t know- and then there are egregious errors- when we know the right thing to do, but we just can’t seem to execute as we’re supposed to, leading to disaster.
For example, I know easily 20 different diet plan that promise to help me lose weight, but it’s not a lack of knowledge, it’s the consistent implementation over time that causes trip-ups. Part of it is programming the environment, and making doing the right thing easier than doing the self-destructive or ignorant or convenient thing. Part of it is keeping simple rules forefront in your mind, and avoiding the infinite shades of gray.
Success will be measured by how well you can adapt to the “rules” or metrics of your environment, or control the environment to your advantage. It’s how well you can fill your social, cultural or economic niche.
And that’s why studying biology and evolution is essential to everyone. Period. Know your niche and optimize it.
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, What The Dog Saw. Unlike The Tipping Point, Blink, or Outliers, which are basically “single” ideas expanded into book form, What The Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s remarkable writing from The New Yorker. You can see this collection, in part, as ideas that elaborate or continue themes Gladwell talks about in previous books, and others that might fit into a future book as well.
Each of the pieces does a great job at what I think Malcolm does best- take a few stories, and deconstruct them, to underlying principals,as if each story were a puzzle piece to solving some larger mystery or problem you’ve thought about but never really found a solution to yourself. He is a fantastic story teller, and can make anything from ketchup to hair dye fascinating. (This link will take you to an audio excerpt from the book from the section on hair color).
But what I get most from Malcolm’s work is insight.
For example, I read about Ron Popeil in the early chapters, and the deconstruction of the infomercial pitch made me think about how those pieces are elemental to any sort of business- you need to have a product or service that can be the star, and you have to find a way to tell the Star’s story, make it intriguing, and then make sure you ask for the money, so everyone can share a piece of the Star’s story for themselves. If you take those pieces and then keep them in mind when you are, say, constructing a presentation, or your website, you start to look at it in a whole new light.
In later chapters, Malcolm talks about genius, and how we also make snap decisions- an idea that’s reminiscent of Blink. But it’s making me consider how we evaluate people, how people evaluate each of us, and what small things you can do to create better “impression management”. There are some people, and one of my children is this way, who are naturally charming and engaging. These are the people we love to be around- they seem to be extra alive and have that X factor that gains them attention whether they want it or not. As a parent, I see part of my job as developing the person behind the charisma, and trying to make sure my child has the smarts and experience to back up his charm. In the end, that first impression opens up doors and lets you have greater access to opportunity, but it’s the execution on that opportunity that will eventually determine whether or not you’re successful.
What The Dog Saw is one of those books I’ll keep coming back to, because there are stories in here, and puzzle pieces I’ll be combining and recombining for a while, to see what new picture shows up in the end. Thank you, Malcolm, for a new book that causes me to think and consider more than any other book I’ve read recently- there’s gold buried in these pages.
Contest!
Thanks to the great folks at Little Brown Publishing, I received a set of Malcolm Gladwell’s books (pictured above) and they would love to send one of my readers their own complete set as well!
(I’m glad to have it, since I regularly lend out these books to friends, and ironically, my golden doodle took a bite out of What The Dog Saw, but didn’t do too much damage – here’s proof:)
(What the Dog Saw became briefly What the Dog Tried to Eat, but fortunately not too much damage).
Please leave a comment here or on one of the other posts I’ve written since November 15, 2009 on what I’m learning while reading “What The Dog Saw” and we’ll place all the names in a hat and do a drawing- I’ll announce the winners here, and Little Brown will send you a complete set for your own, just in time for the Holidays.
Thanks for stopping by, and even if you don’t win, I highly recommend What The Dog Saw. The sections make it easy to pick up and put down- a great book to read every night before bed, for example. I came away from the book simply in awe of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing and ability to tell stories- sometimes shifting in between diverse and seemingly incongruous stories, to show us the analogies and similarities that bring what makes us tick to light, and I only hope to aspire to that kind of brilliance in my writing.
In reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “What The Dog Saw”, and watching his interview on WNYC talking about how someone lifted part of piece he wrote in the New Yorker as part of a larger Broadway play, I’ve been rethinking my approach to idea ownership.
There are tons of ideas out there. I say, I’m sure, hundreds of things daily that are both stupid and sublime. The difference tends to lie in what happens to them once they’re expressed- do they go on to become actions? Do they go on to help other people think differently about their lives? Do they muddle a picture for someone? Can they be fleshed out into meaningful projects? Are they content-free speech? Or are they meaningful, if they just had some place to take root and grow?
A couple of years ago, I sent a very close friend an email. Several of those points ended up as a blog post of theirs, and I felt like they had taken credit for something I brought up to them, and felt a little betrayed. We spoke about it, resolved the matter, and it has been long since left in the pile of silliness that passes between friends. But I thought about this as I heard what Malcolm Gladwell said in his interview and read the story in his book, and I was ashamed at myself in retrospect for having been so small about this matter.
I think Malcolm Gladwell is right- that we seem to fetish-ize ideas and intellectual property, yet everything we do is based on what’s come before us. We all use the internet- we didn’t create it ourselves. When I cook, I make dishes out of cookbooks written by others without giving credit always to the author. I drive a car without acknowledging everyone who contributed to the manufacture. I blog without crediting all the fine teachers, formal and informal, I have had over the years. We owe tons of credit to those who have come before us, fleshed out ideas, taken the next step, advanced things forward, and then we get a chance to add our own stuff on top, to do the same for others as others have done for us.
There’s clearly a line where you take someone else’s work and “steal it”- taking credit for something you did not think of on your own, to the other person’s detriment. And there’s a sense in which taking the work of someone else is really to your own detriment- you lose as well. For example, if you take your brother’s term paper and try to turn it in as your own- that’s intellectually dishonest on many levels, and in the end, the person who loses is not your brother or the teacher, but yourself, for never having had the guts to challenge yourself to do your own work, and have your own thoughts.
But I think if you take someone else’s thoughts and try to build on them, to interpret them and make the meaning clearer for your own self and others, that’s an addition rather than subtraction to the idea.
More importantly, ideas are like seeds. Out of the billions, only a few actually germinate, and fewer still make it to be fully grown and leaf out. A few of those actually make it into the world, and bear fruit, spawning action and changing the way things are done. Sometimes you may have an idea, but you don’t have the resources, money or platform to make it a reality. Should you hold on to the idea, hoping in time you can execute on it, or should you talk about it with friends and see if, with help, it can become something more?
I’m resolving to try to be less selfish with my ideas, and more generous both in the sharing and in helping others execute things I don’t have time to do myself. Because the real measure of a good idea comes from the execution as well as the initial flash of insight. And it’s that combination that really matters- hooking up inspiration with action.
Think about this- can you give a good idea to someone who can execute on it and make it come true if you can’t? And if so, what, if anything, do you need/deserve in return? Sometimes, seeing an idea come to life can be enough- to know that you can make a difference- and that in and of itself is much more rare than we think. Sometimes, we deserve some credit or some recompense for “birthing” the idea, but it’s the sweat equity where the value add truly lies, and this is what I think we all need to remember.
Ideas are awesome, but execution is what really matters in the end.
I have been a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s work ever since reading The Tipping Point several years ago. About a week ago, I bought and started reading “What the Dog Saw and other adventures“, a book that’s largely a collection of his work in The New Yorker. It’s a book that you can basically approach episodically, story by story, but the further I get into it, the harder it’s becoming to put down.
Malcolm is a master story teller, plain and simple. He takes seemingly mundane topics like ketchup or hair dye and turns them into intriguing stories with history, intrigue and a bit of mystery to them. I feel like I’m talking to one of my smartest friends when I read his books, and walk away from each encounter feeling a little smarter and look at the world through slightly different lenses than before.
One of the points Gladwell makes in a story largely about Enron is the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. Puzzles, he says, depend on finding all the pieces to get to the bottom of the matter and arrive at a solution. Mysteries, however, often require more in-depth analysis and experience to put all the information together, including the insight to know what information is irrelevant and merely clouds the issue at hand.
This made me think about the large difference between listening and hearing- we can all access noise and information coming at us, but the real trick is taking this information and being able to hear the deeper messages, the heartbeat- find the thread that leads you to a greater understanding of the whole. For example, when someone tells you a story, you can take it on face value, or you can look at it as a clue that reveals a bit about how the person thinks, acts, and reacts in different situations. Each story we tell reveals a little bit more about how we perceive the world, and as we get older, our ability to use our collection of facts and stories to help people better understand us, and to help them better understand themselves increases.
Malcolm was one of the New Kings of NonFiction Ira Glass spoke to along with Susan Olean and Chuck Klosterman on a CD called An Evening with Ira Glass and the New Kings of NonFiction. (This is truly an amazing piece of audio, and well worth the $10 price.) I was struck by Malcolm’s discussion of how he works, how he would interview someone, and how you can see this in his work in What The Dog Saw. Malcolm takes the information he gathers and weaves it in to a narrative that contains a greater context, making every story bigger than the sum of its parts. That’s his particular genius- placing a context around disparate facts and constructing a case or point of view than makes you think.
Here’s a brief video of him on WNYC discussing plagiarism, and I think you’ll see a bit of what I mean here- Malcolm is not a surface thinker, but likes to place things into a larger framework of what’s really important:
When I read Gladwell’s stories, I’m endlessly inspired to listen a bit differently, to hear with a new set of ears, and to look carefully for those threads of deeper meaning that let me take the surface information, and work the clues and insights into something new. Like he says in the video above, musicians are very generous with identifying their influences and what inspires them, authors not always as much. I can say that what I take away from each of these stories as I read them are small insights that when applied to my projects, will hopefully make them shine a bit brighter, by understanding the interconnectedness of it all.
Contest and a Prize
After a recent recommendation by my friend, Chris Brogan, Miriam from Little Brown Publishing offered to send me a Malcolm Gladwell prize pack to give away on the site, and I could not be any more happy to do it. The prize is a set of Malcolm’s books- The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, a wonderful set of books I think everyone should own, in part, because I do already.
Between now and December 7th, 2009, leave a comment here, or link back to this post on Twitter or from your own site, and tell me one thing you’ve learned this past year that’s changed the way you think about something. Sharing ideas and insights is what Malcolm does best, and I think this is a great way to share with each other in this spirit. On December 7th, I’ll put all the names in a hat and draw a winner, and we’ll send you out this gift pack of great books, just in time for the holidays.
And I’ll keep you posted as I work my way through this great collection of essays about the ideas that are changing the way I think as well.
This could also be entitled “What I’m learning from Malcolm Gladwell and Ron Popeil”.
I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s new book,”What the Dog Saw“- a collection of some of his New Yorker pieces. Since I wasn’t as blown away by his recent Outliers book as I had been by The Tipping Point and Blink, but even in the first chapter, I’ve found a story that’s speaking ideas making it more than worth the purchase price already.
The first chapter talks about Ron Popiel, of Ronco, informercial, and Showtime Rotisserie fame. Ron himself comes from a long line of pitchmen, honing their craft on the boardwalk and fair circuit, before Ron introduced TV into the mix. Ron Popiel has had an affect on my life, as I look back on it, from the first time I bought a Ronco Record in the late 70’s. (Does anyone else remember Ronco and K-Tel? Play that funky music, white boy…..) While I consider most infomercials the height of getting people to buy stuff they don’t really need- this guy is a master marketer we could all learn a few things from, especially when it comes to social media.
How many Ginsu knives and ShamWows do you have in your house? Veg-o-Matics? Pocket Fishermans?
Gladwell does a fantastic job of talking about the art of the informercial, and of Ron as an inventor. Ron has managed to get people to buy stuff for years by mastering the art of show and tell. He makes the product the star, and while he talks to you about it, he uses it and demonstrates, convincingly, how the product in hand will solve problems you never even really knew you had. On top of this, he gains your attention, entertains, and then makes an elegant turn and knows how to ask for the money.
Even in the days leading up to the new FTC regulations requiring truth in advertising, celebrity endorsements and the end of the small print *results not typical*, it’s hard to imagine how any of this will effect Ron. Ron shows everyone, in a personal and empathetic, emotional way, that his products do amazing things, and that every result is typical- no one is surprised. Now, they may get home and decide they didn’t eat as much beef jerky or dehydrated food as they thought, or eat as much salsa as they thought when they bought the veg-o-matic, the product does work exactly as promised. Ron is in the clear.
What I’m learning from all of this, is that even in social media, we have to be clear on what we’re doing. What are we selling? What is the product? Is the product the star, or are we trying to compete for attention with the product? And most importantly, do we know how to convert the interest into money? Do we know how to ask for the money?
As a consultant, I’ve been working with small and medium sized businesses to educate them about what social media can and cannot do for their business. My “pitch” is not for a specific product, but to try to help companies understand social media as a portion of their marketing strategy and how to make the most out of it. I earn money by charging businesses for my time and expertise, and helping them tailor a business strategy that makes sense for them in a way they can measure. I show companies the tools, we discuss pros and cons, and then try to get them to decide where they want to put their time, money and effort, and proceed accordingly. And as much as I can dazzle people with all I know- the “turn”- converting Spectators into Buyers is what needs to happen.
And this goes for every business, every product, every person who needs to sell something to someone else. We need to have products that can sell themselves, because we demonstrate that they are relevant and necessary to our customers. We need to make sure they know how much they need our products to solve their problems, and be ready to ask for the money and sell the product to them when they are ready to buy- not too soon, and not too late. We need to make our case, and the convert the swayed person into a customer.
Ron sure makes it look easy, all the time.
But he’s gotten to where he is because his products aren’t smoke and mirrors- they do what they say. Yes, I have 2 ginsu knives that are as wonderful as they were when I bought them, years ago, impressed by a sales guy at a home show at a convention center. I am a happy customer, and Ron has earned my trust as a result.
I think we can learn a lot from Ron, and from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, if we just remember to let the product be the star, to make sure we understand show and tell, and most importantly, how to ask for the money.
