Once an idea gets loose on the Internet, anyone can grab it. At that point, its -- well, it's up for grabs. It can be proven, disproven, used to buttress an argument (I was very disappointed when I learned that flying buttresses don't actually fly), become the jumping off point for a completely different argument. At the cheapest, it becomes the core of an article where someone repeats what the original person said, possibly adding a couple of words at the end to suggest total agreement (thus validated because now I said it).
This is not exactly one of those posts, but its likely not all that far from it, either.
One of the blogs that I read on occasion is CapForge, which is oriented to small businesses and entrepreneurs. I occasionally have daydreams about doing that, though I think the odds are pretty slender. In this post, the author refers to a post by Seth Godin (who is apparently an Internet Marketing Guru of the first water) where he says that if you're going to be profitable, you need to be very, very good at what you do. Otherwise, he says (both of them say), you're invisible, or as close to it as makes no difference.
Reading that brought to mind Jack Welch's dictum about GE being either first or second in a given line of business; otherwise, they'd get out of it. If you couldn't dominate the field, he wasn't willing to spend resources maintaining an also-ran position. And it brought to mind my own (ahem) observation about the Air Force, EDS, and IBM, which was that they liked two kinds of people: those who were very, very good at what they did, and those who were wage slave company men. The former were accepted and cherished at best, and tolerated at worst, because their value outweighed the grief of having them around; the latter were kept around to do the grunt work and heavy lifting that any organization needs to have done. If you were in the middle -- kind of good, but not great, and not a company-line sort of fellow -- you were disposable, at will.
So the message is: be the key player, in whatever niche or market you choose.
You know -- what they said.
2 comments:
I believe that to run a successful internet business you have to be very good at "something", whether it is manufacturing, marketing, service or whatever. I don't know that you can take a comment like that and apply it to much else, if you do, you would have to be very careful. Think of the millions of anonymous bars in the world...as opposed to the comparatively few Hard Rock Cafe's.
I don't think you can limit it to the internet, but I do agree that you can limit it to 'people who want to be very successful', however they define success. I suspect you can make a case regarding the bars either way. Were I a drinking man, I'd suggest doing an on-site survey....
Theres a line in a Dick Francis novel which I've always hoped was true, somewhere. A person is asking why one of the characters, a home builder, is so successful, and the response is that he asked people what they liked about their homes, and what they didn't like. After a while, he only built homes that contained what people liked.
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