We have heard a lot about the gig economy and the sharing economy. It strikes me that there’s something bigger going on and I think it’s safe to call it the “Nothing is Sacred” economy. There are no more unbreakable rules – so the notion of something being disruptive is becoming increasingly rare. Nothing is Sacred.
I’ll admit that I was raised in a household with a lot of rules, but I think there is a list most of you will agree were accepted as fact not so long ago, and I have broken it into personal and business items – and these aren’t intended to be exhaustive – merely to orient you on the point.
Personal Rules
-Keep your money in a bank
-Own your own car
-Get married and stay married to that person forever
-The husband is the Dad and the mother is the Mom
-You’re born a boy or a girl and that was the end of it
-Never talk about the bathroom
-Never talk about the bedroom
-Eat meals at the table with your family, especially meals like Thanksgiving
-Go to work for your job at the same job for the rest of your life
-To get something you want or need, you have to go to a store
Business Rules
-Everyone works in an office at a desk
-The business has to make a profit
-You have a strategy
-You have a software team that release software in releases from software projects
There are now countless examples illustrating that none of these are rules anymore (to the extent they ever were in the first place). And individually none of them is especially shocking except maybe that there have been over 28 million views of a product called Squatty Potty that uses animated pooping unicorns to make its point (really – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q) and over 38 million people have watched a video about a product that masks bathroom oders called poo pourri (again, really – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q). Both of those videos were created by a marketing team called the Harmon Brothers (http://harmonbrothers.com) and, of course, they have another one about the bedroom – and they seem particularly adept at figuring how to push the envelope.
How did we get there? As is often the case with something like this, Rome was not built in a day. Some of us are old enough to remember some firsts that people still talk about where something that had never happened before happened. Several of these that I can think of happened right in our very own dens as we watched TV. Star Trek’s Captain Kirk with the first interracial kiss. The sit-com Soap that had the first gay character (played by Billy Crystal). Corporal Klinger was the cross dressing army guy on M*A*S*H. Ally McBeal had two women kissing – not sure that was the first same sex kiss on TV but it was memorable. Orange juice pitch-woman Anita Bryant was publicly shamed for her homophobia. On the show Friends, the wife of Ross left him for another woman. So there’s a long list of how we got to the new normal – where none of the old rules apply to our personal lives.
Some of the changes in business rules have been more recent, and more concentrated. And not on TV in your den or your kitchen. People have been increasingly changing jobs and working from home or remotely for a long time – especially in high tech jobs. Amazon was really the first one to prove you can be hugely successful without profits while Microsoft on the other side of Lake Washington was seemingly trying to follow the rules by growing profits, under Steve Ballmer, which went completely unrewarded. I am told Harvard Business School has had to revamp some classes because of that particular episode.
Not having to have a strategy is a newer thing and the companies that have achieved that don’t talk about it much – yet. It relates to the fact that they (Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple to name some) don’t do software projects any more and they don’t release in cycles anymore. They have figured out how to organize teams around products and those product teams are constantly (almost literally) releasing new code. Some call it CICD for continuous integration and continuous delivery. Some refer more to the organizational change – a Matrixed Organization Structure, or MAXOS for short (http://maxos.ai). Because they are releasing new code all day every day – they are able to measure the success or failure of each release pretty close to real time. So when something doesn’t perform as expected, they can change it – also in near real time. People are calling it sense and respond management and because you can manage performance in real time – the need for long term strategies becomes less important for an already established business. So instead of there being rules for how customers are supposed to behave relative to strategies and prior behaviors, now you can just respond to their behavioral changes and go with the flow.
I will admit that the light bulb moment for me on this new reality was this Pillsbury ad that aired around Thanksgiving. http://www.tvcommercialspots.com/food-and-beverage/pillsbury-tv-commercial-happy-friends-giving-from-pillsbury-make-your-own-delicious-crescents-and-toaster-strudels-this-holiday-season-pillsbury-make-dinner-pop-thanksgiving/
. It has some great messages, one of which is that there’s no wrong way to do Thanksgiving – and in a way it felt like a permission slip to people to do whatever the heck they want to do for Thanksgiving. And for me – Pillsbury products were gross and not part of our Thanksgiving – but because of the way they wove the products into the message – all of a sudden Pillsbury crescent rolls are OK now.
So there it is. Here we are. The Nothing is Sacred economy.
Leave a Reply