Good Morning Move Fast, Think Slow readers! And welcome new readers! 🤗MF/TS delivers weekly pro tips on life, team performance, or brand marketing.
It was time for Jeff Bezos business school time last week. Not really a business school. More so key takeaways from his podcast interview with Lex Friedman. The tl;dr is THE INTERVIEW WAS VERY GOOD.
One could argue, that Bezos core tenants are not just about thinking but also about behavior.
Bezos discussed habits he and his teams repeated when it came to drumming up new ideas, and strategies, or making products better. There are good ideas woven with their habits and processes. Because, as it has been covered ad nauseam, Amazon has had an unprecedented growth trajectory.
As an Account leader at an amazing advertising agency, I can empathize with the incredible challenge of doing great work with multiple human beings. And doing it all at once.
If you really listen to Bezos describe his approach to the work, you’re bound to come away with insights on how to make a great chili sauce.
BASKETBALL HERSTORY
Speaking of huge achievement(s). We’d be remiss not bring up Coach Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks going 38-0 after beating Caitlin Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA Championship game last Sunday.
It was a great game with a bit of back and forth. But also a record-breaking 18.8 million people tuned in to watch. Only +4M more than the men’s game on Monday night. These are big numbers, very good for the future of sport.
We have to tip our hats to Coach Dawn Staley who is now 612 - 186 in her collegiate coaching career. Just scroll through her Wikipedia page if you don’t know but she’s one of the greatest player-to-Coach stories in the history of sports. Lowkey not lowkey SHE IS DOMINANT.
You can’t dominate like that without being a leader. In a recent interview, she laid out her secret to guiding young people today:
“Honesty and discipline, [these are] lessons I learned from my mother.”
On never discussing her (legendary) paying career:
“This is all about me meeting them where they are. It changes every day.”
On her generosity in sharing credit where credit is due:
I feel like I’ve been put in the position where I owe basketball. So I’m really trying to repay my debt. I want people to feel what I feel about basketball. The people that I meet in men’s and women’s basketball, they tell me what I mean to them and what I mean to the game. I’m inspired by their aspirations.
She continues to show us greatness and continues to positively contribute to everyone inside and outside the basketball world. #Leadership #GOAT 🙏
Optimizing Ourselves to Death | A buzzkill + an opportunity
As someone who has tried to package Film and TV projects in Hollywood (and failed). Or tried selling big bold ideas to brands to help them stand out in the marketplace. In my career, I’ve been stuck right in the middle of two opposing forces.
Force 1: dynamic creativity and storytelling
Force 2: data & insight
And I’ve seen that the more dangerous and original an idea is, the more the person in charge of unlocking investment wants to prove “it will work” by the RESEARCH & DATA.
THEY ALL WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE DATA!!
The funny thing about that behavior is that research studies show that when people are given perfect data people still make bad decisions. They don’t get more right, they just get more over confident while making the wrong decisions.
As every creative person knows, many times there is no truth/data to tell you a great idea will be land well.
Steve Jobs hated focus groups because people can’t tell you what they want until you show them. Bezos talked about leaving room for antidotes and not letting perfect information suffocate momentum towards getting an idea to ship. Rick Rubin talks about how doing creative work only for commerce sake isn’t real art. He’d argue it has a low virbration.
This is why we often see watered-down products, experiences, and commercial art in the world. Real-time data has given executives a clutch to produce the most simplistic, boring products. Sometimes these product iterations / ideas are effective but over time they drown out the magic of life.
My theory, (which other people also research/discuss) is that since the internet came along and sped up data feedback loops, most corporatists have held onto data with an iron grip as if it were the holy grail of absolute truth.
“Our society has reorientated itself to the present moment.” writes the cultural observer Douglas Rushkoff . “Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up… It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now. So much so that we are beginning to dismiss anything that is not happening right now – and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” Source.
ARE WE OPTIMIZING OURSELVES TO MEDIOCRITY?
Seeing people like Rushkoff and the two writers below talk about this honestly is both refreshing and illuminating. I’m not the only one seeing this happening all around. But also, an environment that’s optimizing us towards mediocrity spells opportunity for creative people trying to do creative things.
THE MONEYBALL OF EVERYTHING IS WATERING DOWN FUN & ENTERTAINMENT
In Derek Thompson’s What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture, he uses baseball as an analogy of how quantification and analytics has possibly negatively influenced the fan experience:
Baseball was colonized by math and got solved like an equation. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits. Singles have swooned to record lows, and hits per game have plunged to 1910s levels.
When universal smarts lead to universal strategies, it can lead to a more homogenous product. Take the NBA. When every basketball team wakes up to the calculation that three points is 50 percent more than two points, you get a league-wide blitz of three-point shooting to take advantage of the discrepancy.
He goes on to talk about movies and music as well. That’s why a lot of films look/feel the same just as the music is starting to all sound the same.
Ultimately, these data-driven decisions prioritize what is statistically successful, leading to a repetition of formulas and a decline in diversity and originality in entertainment and the arts. Yes, analytics can lead to short-term success and efficiencies, but it also strips activities, arts, and sports of their unpredictability, creativity, and human elements, and in turn, make them less engaging and enjoyable.
On one end of the spectrum are a bunch of humans optimizing the products to do better numbers. On the other end of the spectrum are products in sports and entertainment that are becoming so dry that their original flavor is lost.
CONNECTING DOTS - THE AGE OF AVERAGE
In Alex Murrell’s Age of Average, he does a deep dive across a wide range of fields illustrating how homogenous our (Western) culture has gotten.
The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.
But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.
Alex argues that the homogenization most likely stems from our obsession with quantification and optimization. And the “globalization of inspiration” is perhaps a desire for the familiar in a volatile age.
The implications of the article is that we’re all quite simple as human being (everyone wants the same things) but optimizing towards that has created a world that is conventional and clichè.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Some dude in the 90s came up with the book title “When They Zig, You Zag” and it’s stuck as an analogy to imply “if you don’t follow the crowd you can come up with ideas with distinction and difference and then win the day.”
My professional creative expertise is in advertising. So I can tell you, sticking out these days can look like this:
Or doing stuff like this:
or things like this:
or this.
These recent efforts were part of campaigns that did very well in recent months/weeks.
The theme they all share?
They got a little weird with it. And because they did that they stuck out from the crowd.
But you don’t have to do any big campaigns or big ideas to test out ways of being different/unique. Being original and Zaging when they’re zigging can be a little wrinkle. And then you can add up other little wrinkles. And then you might make something quite unique.
The bottom line is we are in an era where we’re overly reliant on data and less reliant on momentum, high quality, and originality.
When our visual aesthetics and experiences are being optimized to be their most basic blandness for optimal metric numbers, then there is an opportunity to go in another direction.
To set a new standard.
To be different.
To dream big.
To show us something new.
IMAGES OF THE WEEK
Go forth.
Stay safe.
Ride the wave.
-Mitch