My Very Fond Memory of My Favorite Bookstore Owner – (And, Where Will the Jobs Be?)

We lived in Beaumont, TX for one year.  It was the early 1970s, I was fresh out of college, getting my feet wet in the work world.  I was a youth minister, but really preparing for my preaching years.  Every week, (sometimes more than once a week), I would drive to a small bookstore. These days, we would call it an “independent bookstore.”  It was a Christian bookstore – i.e., books that dealt with faith, and church, and preaching…  The woman who owned the bookstore knew her books, and kept up with the new releases.  I mean, she knew what was in these books, what they dealt with…  I got to know this woman.  She was “middle-aged,” and smart.  I was young, hungry to learn.  She was not a “clerk,” she was a teacher.  When I resigned, and readied to leave Beaumont, she was one of the first I told.

I loved that bookstore – and her wise counsel.

I could tell other such stories.  I am a serious Nero Wolfe fan.  I have every volume of the Rex-Stout-written volumes, and re-read the entire corpus every few years.  In Snyder Plaza in University Park, there used to be a Mystery Bookstore.  The woman who owned it (at least, I assume she owned it), tried to tell me that the newer Nero Wolfe mysteries, written by Robert Goldlborough with the approval of the Rex Stout estate, were worthy of my time.  I did not warm up to them, though I appreciated her recommendations.

But now…  as much as I love the customer reviews on Amazon (our blogging colleague Bob Morris has written many, many of them), they do not quite mean as much as those conversations with that Beaumont bookstore owner meant to me.

And now, a few “fulfillment center” workers, and lines of code getting me my Kindle App versions of books, have replaced how many countless book-loving bookstore owners across the country?

Call this a snapshot of the modern economy, and one of the reasons why many jobs are disappearing, and others are “less” than they used to be.  In recent weeks, we have learned that “temp workers” are rising rapidly in the overall percentage of jobs.  Here’s the current national look, from this article:

Workers at temporary-help service agencies accounted for about one-third of U.S. job gains in June.

And, read this from Andrew Sullivan:  Temps Are Here to Stay.  It has links to more.  Here’s a key paragraph.:

In the early 1980s, employment in the “temporary help services” industry—which covers both temp workers and employees of the firms that supply them—stood in the several hundreds of thousands. Now it’s 2.5 million, a seven-fold increase in less than four decades. By 2020, the BLS foresees more than 440,000 new jobs in the sector. In the meantime, the temp craze has expanded from air-conditioned offices to warehouses and construction sites.

And, I recently posted about Farhad Manjoo’s rather alarming look at the ascendancy of Amazon and its threat on all retail.  And I am part of the reason – blame me.  It so happens that I like this development.  Over the weekend, I ordered:  numerous household items, ink for my printer, a book or two for my Kindle App, and did so while never leaving my iPad or my easy chair.  In other words, I am helping put people out of a job.  I called my take on Manjoo’s article:  Amazon’s Secret – Make it Easy; Make it Fast; Make it Insanely Convenient. And that is what Amazon has become for me – easy, fast, convenient.  (Oh, and money-saving).

But, here is the thing.  In our quest for convenience and speed, and in the successful efforts of so many companies’ innovative techniques in giving us “what we want” (Amazon is clearly #1 in this regard), the outcome is this:  it takes fewer and fewer people to provide us what we want.  (And, if you have not read, Amazon has invested in some robot company that will replace even more fulfillment center workers).

And, so…  temp workers are on the rise; automation is on the rise; retail is threatened.  And so I ask again, as I have numerous times on this blog, where will the jobs be?

Why Marissa Mayer Is The New CEO Of Yahoo – It Has To Do With Brilliant Decision Making

I just read this article on Slate.com about Melissa Mayer, the new CEO at Yahoo,  Marissa Mayer Is in Over Her Head:  That’s just how Yahoo’s new CEO likes it by the always insightful Farhad Manjoo.  She described how she decided to work at the then very new company, Google, which had very-few-employees. Here’s the key paragraph:

“I had to think really hard about how to choose between job offers,” she said. Mayer approached the choice analytically. Over spring break, she studied the most successful choices in her life to figure out what they had in common. “I looked across very diverse decisions—everything from deciding where to go to school, what to major in, how to spend your summers—and I realized that there were two things that were true about all of them,” she said. “One was, in each case, I’d chosen the scenario where I got to work with the smartest people I could find. … And the other thing was I always did something that I was a little not ready to do. In each of those cases, I felt a little overwhelmed by the option. I’d gotten myself in a little over my head.”
After weighing her options, Mayer chose Google.

So…  work with the smartest people you can find.  And tackle a challenge that is just a little bit too much.  I think the idea is that if it pushes you just the right amount — tough enough to be very, very difficult, but!, still doable — then you learn more, you might succeed spectacularly, and you are then more ready for the next, bigger challenge.

Mr. Manjoo is not sure that this decision, heading Yahoo, will be successful (there may not be that circle of “the smartest people she can find”), but he is convinced that it will be fun to watch:  “And even while I have severe doubts that Mayer will be able to turn Yahoo around, I’m excited to see what she can do with the place. Yahoo has long been headed for failure. Now, at least, it will be an interesting failure, not a depressing one.”

This much is clear:  a person with the ability to follow a very serious process of decision making, a process that can lead to a brilliant decision, will probably lead the pack.  Because, most of us are just not very good at making decisions.

—————

(an aside:  I have said, in one way or another on this blog, Farhad Manjoo is the writer that most consistently gives me the insight that I need).

 

Amazon’s Secret – Make it Easy; Make it Fast; Make it Insanely Convenient

I am a convert.  As I have written before, I now buy most of my books (all that are available digitally) on Amazon’s Kindle App for my iPad.  I get my protein bars though Amazon.  I get my ink for my printer from Amazon.  And a whole lot more.  And my experience on Amazon has made me a more energetic, frequent on-line shopper from other outlets (stores).  And, with my Amazon Prime purchase, I get practically everything in two days.

And it is about to get faster.

I have written before about our growing desire/demand for no hassles! (quoting Frank Luntz):  We Really Don’t Like Hassles — So, our Agenda: Create “Hassle Free”.  And after I presented Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, a participant at our First Friday Book Synopsis said to me:  “Here’s what that book said.  You’ve got to make the change convenient – you’ve got to make everything convenient.”

Well, Amazon is about to really up the bar on the convenience competition for customers.

We first learned this from Netflix.  Their business became more convenient (more convenient than the many, many minutes it took to drive to the local Blockbuster, and browse the shelves).  Netflix took off when it became highly likely that you could get your DVD in the mail the day after you ordered it.   Convenience! – the day after!  (Blockbuster is now bankrupt, by the way).  And now, of course, on Netflix you can watch your movie or TV show immediately, streamed onto your computer or your iPad or your iPhone or your Apple TV.

Amazon Fulfillment Center

Well, today, Slate.com reminds us that Amazon has matched the Netflix convenience model on practically everything.  They are on the verge of providing same-day delivery for most of the country.  SAME-DAY DELIVERY FOR THE WIN!  This truly is the win in the Super Bowl of the convenience league.  As usual, it is the Slate writer Farhad Manjoo who makes this so understandable in his article I Want It Today:  How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail.

Mr. Manjoo describes how Amazon has quietly been making many of its deliveries, promised to Amazon Prime customers in two days, in just one day.  A convenience surprise!  Now, it is about to raise the bar even higher.  Partly prompted by the loss of their “no sales tax” advantage (we started paying Amazon our sales taxes in Texas this month), Amazon is getting ready to do provide “fulfillment” even faster.

From the article:

If Amazon can send me stuff overnight for free without a distribution center nearby, it’s not hard to guess what it can do once it has lots of warehouses within driving distance of my house. Instead of surprising me by getting something to me the next day, I suspect that, over the next few years, next-day service will become its default shipping method on most of its items. Meanwhile it will offer same-day service as a cheap upgrade. For $5 extra, you can have that laptop waiting for you when you get home from work. Wouldn’t you take that deal?
I bet you would. Physical retailers have long argued that once Amazon plays fairly on taxes, the company wouldn’t look like such a great deal to most consumers. If prices were equal, you’d always go with the “instant gratification” of shopping in the real world. The trouble with that argument is that shopping offline isn’t really “instant”—it takes time to get in the car, go to the store, find what you want, stand in line, and drive back home. Getting something shipped to your house offers gratification that’s even more instant: Order something in the morning and get it later in the day, without doing anything else. Why would you ever shop anywhere else?

So, here is the lesson for your business.  Make it easy.  Make it fast.  Make it insanely convenient.  This is the level of customer service that we will all come to expect.

Amazon will force us all to make it easier, make it faster, make it even more insanely convenient.  And if we fall too far behind, well…  we will be left behind.

Maybe It’s time for a new CEO – a Chief Ethics Officer

I think it is time for a new executive officer on every leadership team.  The name of this position should be CEO – Chief Ethics Officer.  (Though I doubt that these initials are available).

“First, do no harm…”

We’ve got a serious problem, and it is going to take some serious solutions.

Now, there is quite a range.  There are some folks who are just downright evil; lying, defrauding…  (Last night, on one of the local TV stations, a web discount site was exposed as that kind of company).

But most “evil” isn’t quite “evil,” but falls under the category of “mistakes.”  And even if they are acknowledged as “egregious mistakes,” they are still costly mistakes that hurt actual people, and can destroy a company’s reputation as a to-be-trusted, ethically upright company.

Let’s start with a verse from the Christian Scriptures:

“Do not be deceived.  Evil companions corrupt good morals.”  (1 Corinthians 15:33. Click here to read a lot of variations, from multiple different translations.  I especially thought this one was gripping:  “Don’t let anyone deceive you. Associating with bad people will ruin decent people..”).

The principle behind this verse is important.  Good and decent people do not intend to do harm.  They do not intend to made bad decisions, to make mistakes, and they certainly do not intend to harm anyone.  But, bad judgment; ignorance; not “thinking through;” being “seduced” by compelling salesmanship or persuasion…  before you know it, a good and decent person can do a not-so-good and decent thing.

Now, how many examples do I need to offer?

Let’s assume that not every NFL player started out intending to do harm, but the allure and the persuasion of a coach and fellow players will lead someone to say, “okay, I will try to take this player out in this game.”  A bounty beckons a decent person to do a not-so-decent thing.

Let’ s assume that Jamie Dimon is the smartest, best banker of the bunch.  But under his watch, J. P. Morgan Chase made an “egregious mistake,” with $2 Billion lost, and real people hurt, from actual losses, and then stock value loss.

Days after disclosing a $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase, the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, admitted that “we made a terrible egregious mistake” in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Or, consider the plight of Mark Zuckerberg.  Farhad Manjoo has a terrific piece up this morning about the Facebook IPO — Ads, Ads, and More Ads:  How Going Public Will Change Facebook for the Worse.  Here’s the opening paragraph of Manjoo’s article:

When Facebook filed for its initial public offering in February, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a frank letter to potential investors in the firm. “Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” he began. “It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” The founder went on to say that while making money was important to Facebook, raking in cash was not its primary goal. “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

He also quotes a line from Google’s early days, adding his own warning:

His letter bears a resemblance to the note that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote to investors in 2004. In that note, Google warned Wall Street that though the search company’s shares were for sale, its mission was not. “Google is not a conventional company,” the pair warned. “We do not intend to become one.”
Don’t buy what any of these guys are selling. Eight years after its IPO, Google is still quirky, still sometimes surprising, and still wildly successful, but it is not at all unconventional. Just like any other company, Google has been swayed by pressure from investors to do things that once seemed unlikely…

In other words, going public and adding stockholders can lead to different decisions over the long haul – decisions that may betray the original mission of the company.

Now, I do not know how to fix this.  But I’ve got a few observations/recommendations.

1)  Run away from the evil folks…  The outright liars, defrauders, bad folks should not be trusted.  Don’t hire them; don’t do business with them; don’t ever trust them.

2)  Assume that every good and decent person can make an occasional mistake.  Sometimes, a whopper of a mistake (an “egregious mistake”).  So, even if you trust the person, remember Ronald Reagan’s advice:  “Trust, but verify.”

3)  Get serious about ethics.  Is it ethical to let the mission of the company be undone by some new set of stockholders?  Is it ethical to abandon a core mission?  Is it ethical to try some fancy new investment instrument when you can’t quite know the ultimate consequences?  Somebody, with genuine clout in the room, needs to be asking these questions.

4)  Quit bellyaching about too many regulations.  Regulations are created because we can’t trust some people, and we can’t guarantee a good outcome from the rest of the good and decent people.  The Volcker Rule, and other rules, are simply at times needed to save us from our own stupidity.  The regulations really can be for our own good.

5)  And, maybe it’s time to put a CEO in the decision making meetings.  A Chief Ethics Officer, who has only one job:  to ask, until he or she is almost hated for it, “is this the right, the wise, the ‘good’ thing to do?”  And, maybe, give that person the authority to overrule us in the midst of our own unwise stupidity.

Help Wanted – Humans Need Not Apply

News item:
Best Buy is in a lot of trouble

News item:
The robot population is growing…fast.

—————

Put this in the “what have you read recently that makes you stop and think?” category.

Yesterday, I read the article by Farhad Manjoo, Making Best Buy Better:  The electronics chain’s only hope is to stock fewer products and sell them a whole lot better.  Here’s a key excerpt:

Best Buy is in a lot of trouble. Once the undisputed leader in technology retail—it vanquished Circuit City, CompUSA, and every mom-and-pop electronics store in the country—the company is now being killed by Amazon online and Apple offline. In March, Best Buy reported a $1.7 billion quarterly loss and announced that it would close 50 stores.  

And, don’t forget:

Amazon recently bought Kiva Systems,a company that makes robots that bring items to warehouse workers for packing, instead of the workers having to run all over the warehouse finding the items. That’s fine for now, but it’s pretty obvious that before too long, the robotic systems will become sophisticated enough that you won’t need the workers at all (or at least you’ll only need a few of them).

That paragraph comes from an article linked to on Andrew Sullivan’s blog: Our Robot Future.  I have posted before about the rise of automation (in fact, quite a few times), asking “Where will the jobs be?’” This latest news does not bring me any comfort.  Here is the key excerpt from Rise of the Machines by Paul Waldman, linked to by Sullivan:

We’re all still going to have to find ways to get people to pay us for doing stuff. Otherwise we won’t have the money to purchase the fruits of all those robots’ labors.

…the problem won’t be that the robots will kill us, but that the rise of robots will disintegrate our society, none of us will be able to make a living, and we’ll kill each other. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice if a robot cleaned your toilet for you?

Don’t think human looking robots.  Think software, automation…  Now, I don’t know about you, but my life is increasingly filled with such robots of one kind or another replacing work that used to be done by humans.  Just this week, I ordered multiple items from two sources. Amazon and Drugstore.com.  I talked to no one.  I clicked my mouse, and two days later the products arrived at my front door.  Oh, some humans were involved in the transactions.  A driver delivered the boxes.  Someone supposedly fetched the items from the giant fulfillment center shelves.  But I did not go into a store and interact with any humans; software facilitated the orders.

The issue is not “will there be more robots replacing more human jobs?”.  There will be.  A lot more!  (Read the Waldman article.  Or, just google it.  And the Google automated software will fetch you a mountain of articles describing our automated future).

The question is (and the chorus asking this question is growing), “Where will the jobs be?”  Oh, there will be industries adding jobs all along.  But will there be enough new jobs, in enough new industries, to provide work for all the unemployed former Best Buy, Circuit City, Amazon.com, workers?

Anyway, that is some of what I read this week.

“Learning Is Static No Longer” – Why The Britannica Will No Longer Be Printed

News item:  Jorge Cauz
, President, Encyclopaedia Britannica:  we will no longer print the 32-volume encyclopedia…

—————

And Farhad Manjoo leads the charge on why this is a good thing:  Expensive, Useless, Exploitative:  Why we should celebrate the end of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition.  “Good riddance,” Mr. Manjoo says.  Here is part of what he wrote:

Most importantly, learning to navigate Google and Wikipedia prepares you for the real world, while learning to use Britannica teaches you nothing beyond whatever subject you’re investigating at the moment.
Don’t buy what Britannica’s selling. Its reliance on expert authority may yield mostly accurate information, but it teaches kids to believe everything they read. If you pay for this service, you’re building a cocoon of truth around students who’ll one day enter a world where everyone claims to be an expert—and where a lot of those people are lying. If you want to learn to suss out the liars, there’s no better training than Wikipedia.

So, I told my wife that Farhad Manjoo wrote that this was a good thing (I frequently quote Farhad Manjoo to my wife, and to my audiences), and she quickly stated the reason in a three word phrase that captured the problem.  She said, “I assume it’s because he said that, with the printed version, ‘learning is static.’”  Well said!

Yes, the world has changed.

I still own my very old (1950s edition) of the World Book Encyclopedia.  I remember the salesman (my mother let me sit in), and he showed us how it was almost indestructible.  I wrote many a “report’ for school from that encyclopedia.

But I haven’t looked inside a physical encyclopedia for years.  Years!  But, I read Wikipedia constantly.  And there may be some entries that are not quite what I need.  But, the consensus is growing that in most instances, Wikipedia is as reliable as any other source.  Kind of the constantly, practically instantaneous, self-correcting crowd effect.

But, more importantly, I don’t have to pay $1400.00, walk across to book shelves, and find and open a volume, and find the entry.  Now, with a tap of my finger, I go from the book I am reading on my Kindle App, to Safari, then I read what I need, and then I go right back to my book in the Kindle App.  It takes seconds.  It is right there.  And, it makes learning as ongoing, fast, and convenient as I could have ever imagined.  It is wonderful.

So, if you are sad about this development, I understand.  I’m a little sad too. But, it’s a done deal.  It’s over.  Time to adjust, and even embrace, this new world.  What else is there to do?

Second Life, Google+ and the Very Rough Road to Successful New (or Sort-Of-New) Endeavors

On Slate.com today, there is a post mortem on Second Life, and a pre-mortem on the “doomed” Google+.  The authors are the Heath Brothers (the Second Life piece: Why Second Life Failed), and Farhad Manjoo (the Google+ take down: Google+ Is Dead).  So, what do we learn?  (By the way, I am a big fan of both the Heath brothers and Farhad Manjoo).

Regarding Second Life, the Heath Brothers say that it is simply a product with no actual job to do.  And for a product to succeed, you need an actual job to do.

What job is it (Second Life) designed to do? Most successful innovations perform a clear duty. When we craved on-the-go access to our music collections, we hired the iPod. When we needed quick and effective searches, we hired Google. And looking ahead, it’s easy to see the job that Square will perform: giving people an easy, inexpensive way to collect money in the offline world.
But what “job” did Second Life perform? It was like a job candidate with a fascinating résumé—fluent in Finnish, with stints in spelunking and trapeze—but no actual labor skills.  

Regarding Google+, Manjoo says that it simply was not, and still is not, “cool” enough (my word).

by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.
…a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful—the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts.
…Google+, by contrast, never managed to translate its initial surge into lasting enthusiasm. And for that reason, it’s surely doomed.

I don’t know a lot about the people behind Second Life, but, regarding Google+, it is safe to say that Google is a true behemoth.  But even Google can not guarantee success against another behemoth, one that people are happy with already (Facebook).

So, what are the lessons?  Here are a few:  a “cool” idea must still serve a purpose by doing a job that people want/need to be able to do.  And, it’s good to remember that to succeed with a new idea is always a tough assignment.  And, if you are truly one-of-a-kind, a less-than-stellar first impression might be survivable, but when you are competing against an established giant, a bad first impression is probably insurmountable.

These two examples fit in the overall history of innovation and “new, new things.”  Netscape gave us our first browser, but did not endure.  MySpace gave us our first “Facebook,” but has disappeared in the rear-view mirror.  Palm Pilot was a wonder, but my iPhone does everything my Palm Pilot did, only better, and without a stylus.  (No stylus! – Steve Jobs insisted).

{By the way, I still have my Palm Pilot.  Do you know what I do with it?  When I am utterly exhausted, too tired to read, but not quite ready to fall asleep, I pull it out and play Solitaire.   I connect with my iPhone, I play Solitaire on my Palm Pilot.  That pretty much says it all…}

The world would be worse off if the Google+ and the Second Life efforts had not been attempted.  We need a lot of new ideas, a lot of new products, a lot of “copycats,” to help us choose the best and lasting products that fill our lives.  Remember, when the automobile was ramping up, there were a lot of car company hopefuls.  Only the best survived.

But, once you “make it,” you’d better keep tweaking and making it even better.  Because, in a garage somewhere, someone is hard at work to put you out of business.

Robots, Automation, and don’t forget Software, May Be Coming After Your Job (Yes, Yours!) – Read And Ponder The Insight Of Farhad Manjoo

The problem was not simply the loss of good jobs to workers in foreign nations but also automation…  Remember bank tellers?  Telephone operators?  The fleets of airline workers behind counters who issued tickets?  Service station attendants?  These and millions of other jobs weren’t lost to globalization; they were lost to automation.  American has lost at least as many jobs to automated technology as it has to trade. 
Robert Reich, Aftershock:  The Next Economy and America’s Future

————

Ok – if you force me, I think I would have to admit that I like reading Farhad Manjoo more than just about any other writer.  He is witty, insightful, to the point.  And this article puts detail and explanation to the idea in the quote from Robert Reich above – automation is genuinely threatening our economy.

(illustration from the Slate.com article)

The article, at Slate.com, is titled Will Robots Steal Your Job? – You’re highly educated. You make a lot of money. You should still be afraid.  He uses words like:  “peril,” and “terrified.”  What he says is that if you really want to know where the jobs have gone, and are definitely going, they are going to nonhuman employees.  Reich and others have sounded the alarms.  Manjoo makes it real – and the real really is frightening.

Here is his main point:  

At this moment, there’s someone training for your job. He may not be as smart as you are—in fact, he could be quite stupid—but what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in drive, reliability, consistency, and price. He’s willing to work for longer hours, and he’s capable of doing better work, at a much lower wage. He doesn’t ask for health or retirement benefits, he doesn’t take sick days, and he doesn’t goof off when he’s on the clock.
What’s more, he keeps getting better at his job. Right now, he might only do a fraction of what you can, but he’s an indefatigable learner—next year he’ll acquire a few more skills, and the year after that he’ll pick up even more. Before you know it, he’ll be just as good a worker as you are. And soon after that, he’ll surpass you.
By now it should be clear that I’m not talking about any ordinary worker. I’m referring to a nonhuman employee—a robot, or some kind of faceless software running on a server.

And for those who say, “no worry – we will just create new kinds of jobs,” well, I hope so.  But Mr. Manjoo isn’t so sure.  Consider these concluding paragraphs to his article:

Most economists aren’t taking these worries very seriously. The idea that computers might significantly disrupt human labor markets—and, thus, further weaken the global economy—so far remains on the fringes. The only deep treatment of this story that I’ve seen has come from a software developer named Martin Ford. In 2009, Ford self-published a small book called The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. In his book, Ford argues persuasively that computers will redefine the very idea of “work” in the modern age.

When I spoke to him recently, I asked Ford about economists’ standard rebuttal to fears of automation—the story of the decline of agricultural jobs in the United States. In 1900, 41 percent of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Over the next 100 years, the technological revolution in farming dramatically increased productivity, enabling fewer and fewer people to produce more and more food. By 2000, just 2 percent of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Yet this shift, which required millions of people to move off farms and acquire new skills, didn’t ruin the economy. Instead, by reducing food prices and freeing up people to do more profitable things with their time, it contributed to massive growth. Why won’t that happen again with information technology—why won’t we all just learn new skills and find other jobs?

“There’s no question that there will be new things in the future,” Ford says. “But the assumption that economists are making is that those industries are going to be labor-intensive, that there are going to be lots of jobs there. But the fact is we don’t see that anymore. Think of all the high-profile companies we’ve seen over the past 10 years—Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter. None of them have very many employees, because technology is ubiquitous—it gets applied everywhere, to new jobs and old jobs. Whatever appears in the future, whatever pops up, we can be certain that IT will get applied right away, and all but the most routine-type jobs won’t be there anymore.”

Over the next few days, I’ll be examining how Ford’s predictions are playing out in a number of professions. I’ll start by looking at how the people in my own life are being replaced by machines. First, I’ll look at my dad’s career, pharmacy. Then, I’ll examine my wife’s line of work, medicine. In my third piece, I’ll turn my investigation inward—how will robots replace writers like myself and Web curators like Jason Kottke? I’ll end the series with a pair of stories on how machines will change the lives of lawyers and scientists. I hope you read every part—if you’re going to outsmart the robots, you’ll need all the help you can get.

So, I will be following these articles in the coming days.  I suspect that I will enjoy reading them — but I won’t like them very much.

Here It Is – Steve Jobs’ Business Philosophy In Three Short Sentences

I’m not a techie.  That’s why I have always relied on Apple.  I’ve used nothing but Apple for all the years I have had a computer, and now I’m on my third iMac (and can’t wait for my next one), I use an iPhone and an iPad.  The iPad is the best “thing” I have ever owned in my life.

So this is a sad morning for me.

In the beginning...

Farhad Manjoo weighs in on Steve Jobs this morning on Slate, after the stunning (though clearly expected) announcement that he is stepping down as CEO.  Here is a portion of Manjoo’s article, Who Needs Him? Apple will do amazingly well without Steve Jobs:

I don’t mean to dismiss Jobs’ contributions. He has been as central to Apple’s success as one man has ever been to any firm in the history of business. But Jobs’ achievement wasn’t just to transform Apple from a failing enterprise into a staggeringly successful one. More important was how he turned it around—by remaking it from top to bottom, installing a series of brilliant managers, unbeatable processes, and a few guiding business principles that are now permanently baked into its corporate culture. Apple today operates in the image of Steve Jobs—and it’s going to remain that way long after he’s gone.
Jobs has done something that must be unprecedented in the consumer goods business: He’s turned a luxury brand into a mainstream one while still hanging on to luxury profits.
This last thing—hanging on to profits—is another central tenet of Jobs’ leadership, one that isn’t going go away after he’s gone. Indeed, if you were to sum up Jobs’ entire approach to business in a single pithy line, it would go something like this: Make good stuff. Make it cheap. Sell it for more than you make it.

Here are the three key sentences:

Make good stuff. Make it cheap. Sell it for more than you make it.

Business 101.  It reminds me of the way Fried and Hannson put it in Rework:

The truth is every business, new or old, is governed by the same set of market forces and economic rules.  Revenue in, expenses out.  Turn a profit or wind up gone…  Anyone who takes a “we’ll figure out how to profit in the future” attitude to business is being ridiculous.  A business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby…
Start an actual business… Act like an actual business and you’ll have a much better shot at succeeding. 

But…after acknowledging this, I confess that I am not as optimistic as Mr. Manjoo about the long-term for Apple.  I wrote a blog post a while back, comparing Steve Jobs’ insight to that of the fictional (based on the real Anna Wintour) character Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada:  Steve Jobs, The Market Of One – His Opinion Is The Only One That Matters.  Quoting from the book Little Bets:

The Steve Jobs factor…The person who makes those decisions …is Jobs.  He’s the market – not users.  He’s the market of one, in the case of Apple…”

I hope Apple continues to amaze us with astounding new, useful, innovative, game-changing products.  But Steve Jobs really is without peer.

——–

The best tweet I read included this:

iSad.

The Parable of the Japanese Steel Executives – Don’t Even Try To Do Everything; Do! One! Thing! Very, Very Well

The Parable of the Japanese Steel Executives – Don’t Even Try To Do Everything; Do! One! Thing! Very, Very Well

Let’s call this the parable of the Japanese Steel Executives.

I remember an interview years ago with Walter Mondale, then the Ambassador of Japan.  He was touring the largest steel plant in Japan, and he asked his hosts, the leaders of the company, what they thought of Bethlehem Steel.  After 30 minutes of Japanese deference and politeness, they paused and asked Mr. Mondale why Bethlehem Steel was branching off so far afield from steel with their investments/holdings.  Mr. Mondale said that it dawned on him at that moment that the Japanese steel men loved steel – while the American steel men chased after profits.  Mondale’s conclusion:  the men that loved steel would end up winning the steel wars against the men who chased profits.

Or, in other words – don’t try to do everything, just do! one! thing!, and do it very, very well.

I thought of this as I read the always helpful/educational/useful Farhad Manjoo this morning.  He writes about the demise of the HP Tablet, and the absolute dominance of the iPad.  (Yes, I have one – - yes, I love it!).

He states that there is actually an opening for a “competitor” to the iPad.  No, not quite a competitor.  Anyone who can afford a Tablet will opt for the iPad.  It is simply that much better than all the pretenders.  Instead, there is an opening for those who wish they could afford an iPad, and can’t.  The idea is a less expensive, “partial” tablet (my phrase).  He describes such a lower priced gizmo, and suggests that Amazon just might be able to make it work.  But it won’t be a competitor to the iPad, it will instead open up that next market “down” from the iPad users.

Here’s the line that grabbed me:

In the tablet market, doing more stuff with a worse user experience isn’t as good as doing less but doing it better.

(Read the full article, Do Less, Do It Better:  A recipe for Amazon’s rumored iPad competitor).

Doing less, but doing it better.  Now this is a formula for success, regardless of your endeavor.  Do your one thing; keep to that one thing; and do it better than anyone else.

So, what is your one thing?  And, how good are you at it?  Define it carefully.  Get better at it.  Become the best.  There’s your agenda for the next few months/years.