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July 21, 2005
Flipped To Last
Clarifying On My Last Post...
I got a few emails on my last post asking if it was a thinly-veiled attempt to signal to News Corp. that they should buy our platform. When I re-read it, I could understand why someone would think that since I stated that they should add mobility to their offering, and yes, I think our platform would fit. Frankly, we built our platform because it would fit with a great many companies as they turn themselves into LMNOs and we think our services, in a variety of capacities, will be valuable to them.
What I meant was that the media industry is moving inexorably in the direction of the LMNO and I think at some point in the future more companies will be adding mobility to their media strategies.
There is a confluence of trends creating a perfect storm that will change our definition of media: Distributed overlapping personal networks, mobile connected camcorders, high-speed wireless data, open networks, open devices, maturing social networking infrastructure, P2P distribution, unprecendented consumer choice and the power to participate in the set design of media rather than having to sit back passively and let the cable television wash over them all points to this conclusion. (Even if I am the only one who thinks so at the moment. ;-)
I want to completely change the media industry from:
- Low choice, low consumer involvement, manufactured, hit-driven, center-of-network oligopsony
To:
- Broad choice, consumer participative, organic, changeable, personal, edge-of-network populist media enablement
...all while disrupting the current media production and delivery paradigm to the benefit of the incumbent media companies which have much to gain by making this shift while at the same time convincing them that their fear of the future is unwarranted and helping them see that the path to greatness lies in embracing the massive change that technology will bring. (In the same way that the movie industry should have embraced the VCR, the music industry should have embraced the MP3 format and Kodak should have embraced digital photography.)
It is a pretty big vision, but you know – go big or go home. If you shoot for the stars and you fall short and only hit the sky, that's still pretty good considering all the good ideas that never get off the ground. My point is that there is a very long value chain that has to be strung together to create the LMNOs and the industry that they will support and from which they will profit. There is no way that with our little company we will be able to do it all on our own. But we are still working on our piece of the puzzle because the larger vision is what is important. When I see major companies also evolving their business models in the right direction, working on their piece of the puzzle, I get excited at the show of progress.
I Want To Create Value For Consumers. That Is All.
Pick up a copy of this month’s Fast Company. I am quoted in the article "Flipped to Last" which is basically about what I am discussing. Senior Editor David Lidsky was doing a retrospective on Jim Collins’ 2000 essay “Built to Flip” and wanted to get my perspective as an entrepreneur. David asked why entrepreneurs don’t aspire to “built to last” status attributed to the greatest entrepreneurs among us like Franklin, Edison, Ford and Jobs.
I explained that it isn’t that entrepreneurs do not want to build companies that have lasting value, and indeed many are doing so right now. It is more the case, I argued, that entrepreneurs simply want to create value, and it is perfectly reasonable for the market to decide where that value gets placed and for how long it will last.
If you can see the vision, that will get you half way there. If you can then execute on the vision, then you are adding value where it did not exist before. How much value you can add depends on how well you can execute on the totality of the vision. And that’s where the line blurs between “built to last” and “built to flip.” Sometimes in order to execute on a broad vision that is built to last, some pieces of the puzzle have to be built to flip – intentionally incubated and hatched in a conducive environment so that their value can be added at the right time to complete the picture. To see the vision realized you don’t necessarily have to own 100% of it. I really like Lidsky’s choice of title, Flipped to Last, because that is exactly what I was explaining. Let's say the vision is "personal computing." Think about how many entrepreneurs have sold their software companies to larger software companies to help deliver the vision of personal computing. Nothing wrong with that.
And that is all I meant in my last post – that the now forward-thinking News Corp. is apparently putting together some pieces of the puzzle in a way I would be doing if I had their resources and wanted to build an LMNO. If they are doing what I think they are doing, they will eventually have to add a mobility piece to complete the puzzle. It's a piece they will soon figure out they want and they are going to find it somewhere.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at July 21, 2005 02:45 PM