Are you defined by your competition? It’s easy to fixiate on you competitors and end up defining your company or product on this competition. Sometimes this works out and defines a market of two symbiotic companies; Think Coke v. Pepsi; McDonalds v. Burger King. But sometimes this behavior kills. Think Facebook. Facebook famously altered their format to compete with Twitter by changing to a Twitter-like interface.. This Twitterization of Facebook created a Frankenstein’s monster of social networking. Taking the usable old Facebook and bolting on a twitter-like crawling “news” feed. Now Facebook serves neither its old users who don’t spend hours a day telling people what type of pizza their eating (let’s face it, more than two posts a day – and you have nothing going on), nor the new users who believe that everyone is interesting in their pizza selection. By playing their competitors game without maintaining the faithful, Facebook gets a big thumbs down.
So the question becomes, what’s a company to do when faced with a new niche competitor stealing their users? In Facebook’s case, I think the answer is to extend their offering rather than cannibalize what they have left. Give users choices to organize their friend information as they see fit. Twitter-like or facebook like. Maybe even allow selection by friend. So you can see the real-time play of the close friend, while periodically peruse the musings of the distant acquaintance. Do I care what score that guy I barely knew in high school received? Maybe Facebook became too enamored with Google like simplicity to offer choices; but then again maybe Microsoft is a better model for domination. The decision smelled of desperation (and don’t think that Twitter didn’t notice). By not being themselves, Facebook diluted their brand, and became a less good version of Twitter. Shame on you Facebook. Bad Business.
Facebook's big blunder
Mediocrity rises to the top
It’s an interesting fact of politics that mediocrity rises to the top. The fault is really, I think, part of human nature and falls from these facts:
Excellence is ignored (it looks too easy)
Failure is obvious
Mediocrity rises (it gets results, while still looking sufficiently difficult)
One of my first encounters in a corporation of this fact was when I supported an IT server infrastructure along with a co-worker. One day, he made some mistakes and irrevocably took down a departmental server. He somewhat clumsily tried to restore it from backups, but had huge issues getting it to work. He eventually got it going late that night after a full day of outage. He was summarily lionized for his efforts.
Why, you might say, would a person be lionized for clumsily fixing his own mistake? Well, because to others, not directly involved, mediocrity appeared to be dedication. This is the next tenet of mediocrity:
From a distance, Mediocrity looks like dedication – it’s hard work
So, let’s suppose my clumsy co-worker had these issues repeatedly (actually he did not, he was really a pretty good guy); breaking things, then taking an inordinate amount of time to fix them. Over time, what do you suppose his reputation would be to those at a distance? I propose, he appears dedicated. It appears he takes charge of issues. I appears he works tirelessly to resolve them, often late into the night, a real go-getter. Who do you suppose rises in the organization? Who do you suppose was the person deciding to raise him up, perhaps another like himself who was formerly raised to that position. This brings me to the next tenet:
We are blind to our own failings and our own strengths
Excellence is ignored (it looks too easy)
Failure is obvious
Mediocrity rises (it gets results, while still looking sufficiently difficult)
One of my first encounters in a corporation of this fact was when I supported an IT server infrastructure along with a co-worker. One day, he made some mistakes and irrevocably took down a departmental server. He somewhat clumsily tried to restore it from backups, but had huge issues getting it to work. He eventually got it going late that night after a full day of outage. He was summarily lionized for his efforts.
Why, you might say, would a person be lionized for clumsily fixing his own mistake? Well, because to others, not directly involved, mediocrity appeared to be dedication. This is the next tenet of mediocrity:
From a distance, Mediocrity looks like dedication – it’s hard work
So, let’s suppose my clumsy co-worker had these issues repeatedly (actually he did not, he was really a pretty good guy); breaking things, then taking an inordinate amount of time to fix them. Over time, what do you suppose his reputation would be to those at a distance? I propose, he appears dedicated. It appears he takes charge of issues. I appears he works tirelessly to resolve them, often late into the night, a real go-getter. Who do you suppose rises in the organization? Who do you suppose was the person deciding to raise him up, perhaps another like himself who was formerly raised to that position. This brings me to the next tenet:
We are blind to our own failings and our own strengths
Just as we seem to value mediocrity in others, we strangely value it in ourselves also, time creating a distance to the events in our memories just as powerful at obscuring truth as organizational distance. Another Tenet:
We tend to undervalue our own strengths (they seem easy to us)
We tend to overemphasize our weaknesses (they seem insurmountable to us)
We tend to value our own mediocrities the highest (they seem like the noblest achievements)
So if this is true, and we value our own mediocrity as it brings us the most satisfaction and perceived challenge, and we likewise value the mediocrity of others for the same reasons, then is it a wonder that we all choose paths in life that enhance our own mediocrity, and that mediocrity is rewarded both in its essence and as a reflection of ourselves.
We tend to undervalue our own strengths (they seem easy to us)
We tend to overemphasize our weaknesses (they seem insurmountable to us)
We tend to value our own mediocrities the highest (they seem like the noblest achievements)
So if this is true, and we value our own mediocrity as it brings us the most satisfaction and perceived challenge, and we likewise value the mediocrity of others for the same reasons, then is it a wonder that we all choose paths in life that enhance our own mediocrity, and that mediocrity is rewarded both in its essence and as a reflection of ourselves.
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