The Change Function Meets The WSJ's Lee Gomes - Will I be paying for dinner?
We are fortunate to have an exclusive audience of consulting relationships that account for the core of our business at Coburn Ventures and typically I write them a piece applying the Change Function to this product or situation or market or...
Today - I thought it may be useful to review a few of the points Lee Gomes made in Wednesdays journal to clarify how I use our framework and how I don't... If it helps, great.
Lee has been a friend for a long while and has interviewed me before for WSJ features so when I glanced to see he was reviewing The Change Function I thought his every word might sync with my intent but here and there it went astray. Lee is one of my weekly must-reads and we will get together soon to chat live and in depth about the book. Lee describes me as passionate and the same holds of Lee. I can feel it in his words.
So...
First... Lee pays a number of compliments throughout the review (thanks) and any time I can garner four columns of the most famous business newspaper on the planet I am pretty darn happy and flattered straight away.
So... There seem to be two key misconceptions that hook Lee and I can understand each since we worked hard to avoid the confusion that we seemed to have created for Lee. In most cases we seemed to have crossed the chasm (pun intended) but not in this case.
1. Lee seems to anticipate that The Change Function will be a formula like Black Scholes as opposed to a function that explains relationships. We didn't call it the Change Formula because we don't have one! Would be nice! The Change Function is a framework much in the way George Soros introduced Reflexivity but not as Fischer Black and Myron Scholes developed their formula.
We might say for example that the economy is a function of interest rates, inflation, wages... And represent it as GDP = F (r, inflation,....) But no one would create a scientific formula from those inputs in their right mind.
Sorry for inadvertantly building your hopes.
2. Lee seems to think "crisis" is a black or white. We also had that communication problem an awful lot in the past but not all that often after Jaron Lanier suggested at breakfast one day in Berkeley that we speak of a spectrum of "crisis". At the bottom we put indifference and at the top is full out "crisis". Talking in Jaron's terminology seemed to clear up the communication issues as we spoke the Change Function a zillion times with clients though we suspected our new communication might certainly fail now and again, as it seemed to in this instance.
So did I have a full out crisis for an iPod? Nope. But as Lee points out "I just wanted it" -- but Lee stops there I think to imply I am operating outside of my own framework which, since it is a framework is impossible for better or worse.
What was my "want" (or small "c" crisis)??
Here goes: I have been a music listening nut from a young age probably thanks to my brother Ted who introduced me to the Allman Brothers at age 4. Right now I am ironically listening to Jack Johnson's train diddy "Breakdown" while riding Amtrak. So, as I travelled a zillion miles around the planet I carried 20 discs and my disc man. But choosing from 20 is insufficient for a two week trip thru Asia! "Crisis". Not full out crisis but somewhere higher than lower on the spectrum. The iPod siren song was "pip, you can have ALL your 350 discs if you buy me" -- sold. Your "crisis" may have been different. The Change Function is personal.
So the "formula" issue and the "crisis" issue are covered and hopefully the explanation is useful. Yell if any further questions on these elements because they really set up all we do from there.
Okey doke...
Lee picks at our interpretation or application of the Change Function suggesting that Iridium was only explained by pain of adoption factors while we also suggest that few people on Earth had a crisis in any way shape or form in 1998 to make cell calls while traveling in the Sahara as was depicted in marketing material. I doubt Lee argues with that but he does seem to lump Iridium under the general banner of wireless as opposed to analyzing the specific apps Iridium was target at. I was VERY positive on Qualcomm in 1998 while very negative on Iridium.
WebVan - I claim among the 20 explanations I offer on the "crisis" side of the analysis that peer pressure faded for many Internet-based next gen apps such as WebVan, the need to carry a Palm Pilot, and CFO's feeling forced to create an internet "strategy". As witnessed in 2000 that the pain to be cool by wielding a Palm Pilot whose growth halted with the Nasdaq collapse ceased and the ridiculous daily rash of eB2B announcements halted because CEOs no longer felt the heat to appear before their boards with an Internet strategy they didn't really themselves understand at any rate. Phewww.
At times Lee thinks that my Change Function framework might exclude issues such as product quality or pricing which it most certainly doesn't at all since we have been applying the Change Function live thousands of times and those issues are always critical. Most of these misinterpretations will be cleared up over a Chai Tea Latte or a Shipyard Ale and if they aren't I will pick up the tab for a dinner as well! (I hope you don't feign ignorance :))
Frameworks such as The Change Function are NOT formulas but they are holistic and don't excuse themselves when "competition" is raised as an issue!
So we will see if I will be picking up dinner and I will report back!
Here is the encore...
I would be bummed if Lee was right that I need to be present for the Change Function to be applied. I hope not. What a limited tool if only one person on Earth can apply it! Yikes!
In the book I offer 10 key questions you can ask to apply fairly easily - I hope - the Change Function. In some cases it seems to work. Here is some evidence. One client couldn't see why Lee thought he had to wait for me and instead couldn't Lee take his own shot at explaining why grandparents would have any form of "crisis" with regard to digital photography when photo album shipping seems to work just fine...
From a client:
"Grandparents frequently live far away from their grandchildren, and many of them genuinely feel like they are missing out on all that is going on in their grandkids' lives. How many parents are going to invest the time and effort to put together scrapbooks or photo albums of their kids and mail them out to their parents? For the vast majority of parents I would imagine the number is very low. (High perceived pain of adoption) This is a crisis - for both parents (assuming they want to share the events in their kids' lives with their parents) and grandparents (who are feeling left out of the joyous moments in the lives of their grandchildren)...
...With the advent of easy to use digital cameras and online photo sharing sites, now parents can e-mail photos weekly if they are enough of a photographer, or at least as frequently as events may dictate (birthday party, soccer game, school event, etc.). Now grandparents can feel much more involved than they had been in the past. Crisis solved."
For those who read The Change Function and have questions please holler. If you disagree with my interpretations and applications I hope you feel free to generate your own as I have no desire to be needed to apply this framework. What I am hoping is that I contribute my part in making technology work just a little better somehow as someone applies my ideas and thereby perhaps makes the world even slightly better in some way for my contribution.
Thanks again Lee for all your thinking.
Yep, my thumbs are aching.
Pip