November 2011

About once a month, the partners at High Lantern Group gather a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you – and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.

Six Ideas That Made Us Think

Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Amazon’s Long-Term Thinking

The arrival of the Kindle Fire this month is yet more evidence of Amazon’s long-term view of the world. Whatever you think of the product (and reviews are mixed), it is clear that Jeff Bezos has been thinking about reshaping the market since the beginning. Eric Jackson at Forbes has done a great job at analyzing Bezos’s letter to shareholders back in 1997, at a time when most customers were just beginning to discover online shopping. Despite the market’s infancy, Bezos understood how big it could be:

Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery…Many large players have moved online with credible offerings and have devoted substantial energy and resources to building awareness, traffic, and sales. Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas.

Jackson argues that Bezos built his strategy by ignoring short-term metrics and focusing on the 5-to-7 year plan. Worth Reading.

2. Three Ways of Looking at Data

Who rules the smartphone market? It depends on how you look at it. Don’t miss this brilliant visual analysis of the competition (make sure to scroll all the way through). A powerful reminder that there is always more than one way to look at - and present - data.

3.  The Lessons of Rick Perry’s Brain Freeze

A day after Governor Rick Perry couldn’t recall all three government agencies that he would cut if elected president, the video of his epic political gaffe had more than 1.5 million hits on YouTube. Yet, for all the hullabaloo, the question remains: why do people who have made the same points thousands of times make such mistakes? Byron York,  in a nonpartisan and nonpolitical column, suggests that the problem with Perry is one that is common to many business leaders: they fail to do the early stage thinking about message, intent, and strategy:

Perry, for all his success as governor of Texas, appears not to have thought long and hard about why he wants to be president and what he would do if he achieved his goal. It’s the kind of intense thinking that goes on long before a campaign actually starts; once the candidate is on the trail, it’s too late for soul-searching, self-evaluation, and in-depth study. It’s hard for a candidate to have a firm grounding in issues and policy if he has not first done that kind of thinking.

4.  The Non-Lessons of the Penn State Meltdown

Since the Penn State scandal broke, the internet has been awash with arm-chair and professional “crisis management experts” telling us what the university’s besieged communications staff should have done (Our favorite:  “What Penn State and Kim Kardashian Can Teach Us Abour PR”). What quickly becomes clear is that, in the midst of a moving story, all this Monday-morning-quarterback advice - to “get control of the message,” or “to get ahead of the story” - is useless. Among the lockstep crisis management industry, we found one dissenter worth reading:

It’s time we stop describing gross managerial missteps, operational failures, lying, cheating, fraud and, in this case, systemic legal and moral failings as public relations _____ (insert “disaster,” “nightmare,” or “debacle”)...It seems to us to be almost like ambulance chasing for public relations professionals to make themselves look smart at someone else’s expense by bloviating about “what Penn State should have done.”

5.  The Case for Growing the Lawyers’ Market

Here’s a refreshingly contrariran piece from the Brookings Institute. Unlicensed lawyers, it seems, could solve our “lawyer problem” and break up the American Bar Association’s monopoly:

What most people don’t realize is that lawyers have cleverly created many restrictions on their industry’s size and services through their governing organization, the American Bar Association (ABA). Thus, the solution to the “trouble with lawyers” is counter-intuitive: we may need more of them - or, at least we must spur more competition among them by busting the lawyer monopoly!

6.  Everyone is Talking About Daniel Kahneman

Something is going on when two of America’s most compelling writers, Michael Lewis and David Brooks, have each recently written articles (here and here) celebrating the new memoir of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Both authors explain that Kahneman (and his late collaborator Amos Tversky) overturned assumptions about how we make decisions. Lewis credits Kahneman and Tversky’s work for making the theory of Moneyball. He explains their importance this way:

They provide a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other “experts” have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).

For more information about High Lantern Group, please visit our website at www.highlanterngroup.com

Unsubscribe |  Profile Center