4 ms·
I wonder why so much of the business writing suffers from survivorship bias type writing - what wrong lessons are we all drawing every day because of that. The
by a_d 8y ago
I wonder why so much of the business writing suffers from survivorship bias type writing - what wrong lessons are we all drawing every day because of that. The esp dangerous ones are probably the ones that sound right but are wrong.
I am a big fan of startups, those who build and innovate. I even like the strategic advice that VCs/ex-founders give about building a business.
However, any writing of the style: "Facebook, Google, Zynga, Twitter did [x] when they were small -> So you must do [x]" doesn't resonate strongly with me. It has this underlying promise of 'if you did [x] you will become Facebook' - which ignores a vast multitude of other factors that went into making an FB. It is worth thinking much harder about how much of [x] is actually right on a strictly case-by-case basis -- depending on what one is trying to build, the problem one is trying to solve and for who.
Sometimes one has to take a different approach and build several features/product bundles in order to sell.
One approach probably is to find some overriding truths that are close to being immutable: such as,
1) make something people want (I haven't seen a counterexample to this yet)
2) nothing happens until somebody sells something (This puts focus sharply on building what will sell)
3) articulating 'why now' to the best available clarity is important in my view (even if to explain why a bigger scope may be needed now than in the past - e.g. if one has to build an HR system today, they would probably need to build a payroll integration as a feature; this wasn't true before 2013-14)
The problem of course with these that they sound super generic that they cease to be of value after a point.
- ggg9990 8y agoThis type of thinking is everywhere. “X did Y and succeeded, so I should do Y.” It’s why lots of startup founders wear the same outfit every day, why Trump’s Republican opponents tried calling him names, why people buy Michael Jordan branded basketball shoes.
- dave_sid 8y agoYes this annoys me. It’s even worse when X does Y long after they became successful and everyone starts saying they need to do Y to succeed. Well Y wasn’t what made X successful!! I believe that kind of thing is just touted by consultants in Y to make Y seem with paying for. (Eg whatever the latest Agile incarnation might be).
- mikekchar 8y agoI always say that there's a difference between "because of" and "in spite of". I remember a hamburger restaurant that opened up. It had very good hamburgers and was very popular. The staff were always singing. It was a singing hamburger restaurant. About a year after it opened, I noticed a lot of other singing hamburger restaurants opening up. They all failed miserably -- mostly because their hamburgers weren't very good. After about 2 or 3 years the popular hamburger restaurant folded. They still had really good hamburgers, but the singing was really annoying and eventually nobody wanted to go there any more. Interestingly, around the same time I heard of other singing hamburger restaurants in other cities. I always wondered if it was some horrible cargo cult fad, or if it was just a coincidence.
- a_d 8y agoSuch a great comment. I will use this hamburger example from now on to make the point I was trying to make! :)