Fame, popularity and money are by-products, but the master is not really dependent on that. In fact, he might even see it as undesirable side effects. As someone commented on Hugh’s post, it’s not even about the product, it’s the process. In Hugh’s own words “It’s something that truly belongs to you” and perhaps that’s why it’s so much more better, because there’s no dependency, unlike the by-products.

It’s more of a personal learning for me, and it struck a chord as soon as I read it, as though I had the thought in my subconscious but lacked the cognizance to express it, even it to myself. In fact, I’d go on now to slightly disagree with Hugh MacLeod and say that for many people, mastery is success.

Meanwhile, how does all this apply to business and brands? If I look at it through the prism of how things work now, I might be inclined to say that mastery cannot really scale, and I’d go back to my ‘Institutional Realignment‘ post and say that we’ll eventually get back to making mastery, a smaller ‘audience’, and a lesser scale the norm.  But in some ways, I can see examples of brands having mastered a culture and found a way to scale it – the much abused example – Zappos.

However, if I had to look at it another way, I’d say that the web has made discovery much easier. Not in the traditional media way of ‘push the message to a mass and the interested ones will find you’ kind of a way, but the exact opposite. To use the data that people are sharing and through that, to find the right audience. The kind of audience who will appreciate the brand’s mastery, and who will then create good old fashioned community and word of mouth. The web offers tremendous opportunities to focus, but unfortunately we’re still in the early days of organised marketing and CRM data and most brands are busy losing focus and spamming themselves into oblivion, courtesy the lure of scale and its trappings.

Of course, a part of me believes that mastery should have nothing to do with business, but as with many other things, the web might just change my perspective.

until next time,  Master of Business Administration

The two posts I had linked to last time remain relevant in a Google vs Facebook  discussion – “Google’s real problem – GTD” at GigaOm and “Facebook and Google” at Piaw’s blog. Meanwhile, Robert Scoble wrote an excellent post last week titled ‘Why Google can’t build Instagram‘, which brought out a whole lot of other perspectives on what prevents Google from innovating at a rapid pace (also probably the reason why Facebook is stealing its thunder regularly) – organisational size (something we keep discussing here), controlling the scope of products/services, an infrastructure that’s not built for a smaller social scale, the necessity to support all platforms (because they’re Google, that’s expected of them, thought this holds true for FB too), the inability to use a competitor’s graph (in this case, Facebook), the need to ship a product/service that’s near perfect (because they’re Google!) and so on. Scoble also throws in a few pointers on how Google could still innovate, and I thought some of Android’s success could be attributed to one of those – sending it out and allowing developers to build on top of it. You can get another interesting perspective on Google and scale here. (via Mahendra)

The other understanding I developed was that with scale, even the organisation’s vision could change, (though the reverse is what we see regularly) and that would affect everything from competitor landscape to culture. So the challenge is to keep people hooked on – employees and users.

I’ve come across excellent posts on both these. The organisational aspect is the core theme of Gautam’s blog, and so its not surprising that I’ve seen two posts in the recent past that tackle this subject – Inspiring People, and Making Work Meaningful. The other must read in this context is the 2010 Shift Index, specifically the ‘Passion and Performance’ part. From a consumer perspective, few people can articulate it better (especially since a toon is usually more popular than a 1000 words) than Tom Fishburne, and again, two relevant posts – App  of dreams (as a devout Angry Birds player, I identify completely) and The Antisocial Network.

Despite approaching it from two different sets of stakeholders, the common thread is easy to spot – that brands/organisations need to figure out a reason for existence that goes beyond their business mission and balance sheets. This would then help them identify the ‘something’ that people – both employees and consumers  can identify with and would want to belong to. Coincidentally, this is the drawing I got on my Gaping Void subscription today.

(Hugh credits Mark Earls for first voicing this thought)

Not very long ago, Google spearheaded a revolution of sorts, by creating an algorithm that connected a web user with the information he sought. The only thing that topped it was the business model they built on it. Many have attempted it before and after them, but there was only one Google. The world changing mojo seems to have been transferred to Facebook these days, and even to Twitter to a certain extent, as, in different ways, they connect us to people we know/want to know in various contexts. Information sharing then becomes one of the applications of this connection. This phenomenon is called (by) many names, including social media.

Perhaps brands and organisations fail to understand the philosophy of social platforms/interaction and get lost in the applications. A bit like wanting to build a social layer on top of everything you have created so far and meanwhile, firing an employee for telling the world he got a bonus and raise

until next time, titanic shifts

Bonus read: The Heart of Innovation via Dina