2009: In search of the Outlier
I started 2009 by diving into Malcom Gladwell’s new book Outliers. The book is an extension of some the ideas he introduced in Blink and it offers some great lessons in not assuming the obvious. With everyone justifiably concerned about the global economic environment in 2009, it appears to me that business managers will have to determine whether they will focus on limiting the damage of the macro economic issues or aggressively develop ”outlying” opportunities. The fact is that bad economies favor cash rich market leaders. They have the ability to weather the credit crisis and the discretion to develop market share strategies that pressure competitors. The dilemma is defining what is a true “Outlier” what is the missing data point or market opportunity that would trigger a market changing initiative? In his book Gladwell touches upon an analysis of very high IQ (genius) individuals and examines why their performance in life was relatively average when compared to a random sampling of the population. The reality is that business leaders often make the same mistake. In the same way that IQ was overly weighted in determining success, my belief is that we don’t look for intangibles and orthogonal data. I have had personal experience with this, in 1997, I had two executives at Motorola tell me that no one would ever watch video over the internet displayed in a 3 inch by 3 inch square. There was no market data to support it, so we abandoned our market leading technology! When Real Networks went public a year later, I learned a lot about instinctive marketing and understanding a trend vs. a fad. I believe 2009 presents some amazing opportunities for companies with solid, intuitive, product development teams and marketers. The continuing verticalization of content on the web will open huge opportunities for content creators, the emergence of mobile platforms (iphone, android, symbian) will open up entire new markets for software developers and the proliferation of cloud computing and virtualization will create new enterprise computing services. So the question is who will seize the opportunity? With Venture Capital tight and entrepreneurs struggling to find angel investors, the landscape is open for the “big boys” to find their “Outliers” to risky? Let me know what you think!
Reference: Malcom Gladwell Site | New York Times Review