Lazy Book Review: The Dip

I do tend to read a lot of pseudo-inspirational business books. My criteria is that a business book has to deliver at least one good idea (that I didn't already know) in order for me to consider it a success.

Seth Godin has chosen to not over-deliver with his book, The Dip. I'm afraid to even talk about it too much, because at only 80 pages, there's really only one main idea. If I tell you what it is, is it worth reading the book?

Spoiler below!








The idea in a nutshell (and that's how its delivered) is that some things in life start easy, get hard, and then become rewarding. Other things never become rewarding. The trick is to figure out which is which, quit the non-rewarding stuff, and slog through the stuff where there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Okay. Seems reasonable.

But Godin never really gets into what I consider the heart of the matter - how do you tell the difference between the good scenario (called the "Dip") and the bad scenario (called the "Cul-de-sac"). What advice can he give for telling whether its worth continuing down the difficult path ahead? Alas, he never says. Maybe that will be a sequel.

On the upside, it does contain one of the best quotes I've heard in a long time:

"'I can't take it anymore!', he cried, mistakenly."

How the Amazing Becomes Merely Adequate

Why is it that things that blew us away a short time ago (last year, last week...) suddenly fade into the background for us today? Why does the thrill leave so suddenly?

The tech industry is particularly terrible in this space. How fast the shiny new (gadget, software, web site) becomes yesterday's news. Did it suddenly do whatever it does less well? Well, no, then it must have been our perceptions that shifted somehow.

The folks at the Chasm Group define features that merely meet the expectations of users as "hygiene". Basically the story goes: you don't get points for good hygiene. You do, however, get points taken away for bad hygiene. Good hygiene is just expected.

The kicker is that what was fabulous and new last year is just hygiene now.

How do features cross this line? Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator's Dilemna, suggests that features are more compelling when isn't yet sufficiently developed to solve the business problem for which its designed. Every feature upgrade is a huge deal, because it takes the product closer to crossing the line where it can actually address the business problem.

Once it crosses that line, however, the new features become much less interesting. Think Microsoft Word. There are those who feel it was perfect about 10 years ago.

I was thinking about this when I stumbled across the Japanese idea of two kinds of quality (it comes from Total Quality Management):

1. atarimae hinshitsu: The idea that things will work as they are supposed to (e.g. a pen will write.).
2. miryokuteki hinshitsu: The idea that things should have an aesthetic quality which is different from "atarimae hinshitsu" (e.g. a pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer, and leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader).

(Above bullets quoted from this wikipedia page).

So maybe there's something here - is it possible that features transition from miryokuteki to atarimae as our perceptions change? Perhaps what had an aesthetic quality yesterday (wow! A graphical user interface!) simply becomes part of the expected behavior today.

My question is really if we can control the speed of the transition. How can we think about how we make stuff to prolong its powers of differentiation? It may not be possible to prolong the "excitement lifespan" of individual features, but an organization that pushes well into the "wow" space will create lasting value in the way they are perceived.

Checking out at Apple

I try not to cross-blog too much but, here goes...

Seth Godin mentions shopping in the Apple Soho store, talking about the amazing composition of the audience (Women! In a computer store!). He then complains about standing in line at the registers. I just want to mention the last point.

I recently bought a copy of iWork from the 59th St. Store. While waiting in line, an Apple employee buzzed the line, asking, "anyone paying by credit card?" I volunteered, and he did the checkout using this handheld wireless device. Because I already had an Apple ID, my receipt was emailed to me. No signature was required (Starbucks is also doing this now).

No paper whatsoever. Very fast. Why don't more stores do this?

Wax in the Wild: PackRat

This is a classic WAX app - its a front end for 37 Signals BackPack, it has an offline mode, and to enable that it has sync. You can find it here.

It points down to the basic elements of WAX.

• A rich client front end.
• A web service with an API.
• State synchronization between the client and the server.

PackRat is a great example of that.