Product Differentiation Quotes

Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

Launching a similar product still needs some kind of differentiation.

CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.

Put bluntly, the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it's a biology problem. And just like a person struggling to put her emotions into words, we rely on metaphors, imagery and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. Absent the proper language to share our deep emotions, our purpose, cause or belief, we tell stories. We use symbols. We create tangible things for those who believe what we believe to point to and say, "That's why I'm inspired." If done properly, that's what marketing, branding and products and services become; a way for organizations to communicate to the outside world. Communicate clearly and you shall be understood.

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.

Here’s Ohga: “At Sony, we assume that all products of our competitors have basically the same technology, price, performance, and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved.

If you have a “commodity” offer, you will compete on price (having a price-driven purchase versus a value-driven purchase). Your Grand Slam Offer, however, forces a prospect to stop and think differently to assess the value of your differentiated product. Doing this establishes you as your own category, which means it’s too difficult to compare prices, which means you re-calibrate the prospect’s value-meter.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe. Remember, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. If a company does not have a clear sense of WHY then it is impossible for the outside world to perceive anything more than WHAT the company does. And when that happens, manipulations that rely on pushing price, features, service or quality become the primary currency of differentiation.

In his book, Jüdisches Erwerbsleben, Georg Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI’s great uncle, wrote: “Jewish commerce can be characterized by two manifestations: 1) it is based on the exploitation of the work of others without any productive activity of its own and 2) it is characterized by gambling and speculation on the differential in values as the way to achieve riches.

mental activity such as directing attention, actually shape the structure of the brain?” As we’ve seen, experience means neural firing. When neurons fire together, the genes in their nuclei—their master control centers—become activated and “express” themselves. Gene expression means that certain proteins are produced. These proteins then enable the synaptic linkages to be constructed anew or to be strengthened. Experience also stimulates the production of myelin, the fatty sheath around axons, resulting in as much as a hundredfold increase in the speed of conduction down the neuron’s length. And as we now know, experience can also stimulate neural stem cells to differentiate into wholly new neurons in the brain. This neurogenesis, along with synapse formation and myelin growth, can take place in response to experience throughout our lives. As discussed before, the capacity of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity We are now discovering how the careful focus of attention amplifies neuroplasticity by stimulating the release of neurochemicals that enhance the structural growth of synaptic linkages among the activated neurons.

Having a Grand Slam offer makes it almost impossible to lose. But why? What gives it such an impact? In short, having a Grand Slam Offer helps with all three of the requirements for growth: getting more customers, getting them to pay more, and getting them to do so more times. How? It allows you to differentiate yourself from the marketplace. In other words, it allows you to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE. Commoditized = Price Driven Purchases (race to the bottom) Differentiated = Value Driven Purchases (sell in a category of one with no comparison. Yes, market matters, which I will expound on in the next chapter) A commodity, as I define it, is a product available from many places. For that reason, it’s prone to purchases based on “price” instead of “value.” If all products are “equal,” then the cheapest one is the most valuable by default. In other words, if a prospect compares your product to another and thinks “these are pretty much the same, I’ll buy the cheaper one,” then they commoditized you. How embarrassing! But

It's just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present and future. But we're intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so, in moments like this-when I can imagine you sitting exactly where I am, listening to me, loving me, missing me-it tortures us. Because I'm locked in my moment, and you're locked in yours.

Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.

The reality is, strengths can be copied. It’s true for your company, and also for you. Products can be replicated. Benefits can be improved upon, secret formulas uncovered, winning systems beaten. People can outdo your strengths. But nobody can outdo who you are. Your personality is the only aspect of your work that nobody can copy. People can copy your product, your pricing, your actions, your recipe or program or formula. But they can never replicate who you are. Who you are is the greatest differentiator you’ve ever had.

The “quality revolution” in the latter half of the 20th century has taken us to a point where all products that reach a supermarket shelf work. The competitive differentiators of the future will be products which are the most innovative, even though they may not be the best

Is my product compelling to our target customer? Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible? Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship? Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build? Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds?

When {Born and Heisenberg and the Göttingen theoretical physicists} first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices. So they had gone to Hilbert for help and Hilbert said the only time he had ever had anything to do with matrices was when they came up as a sort of by-product of the eigenvalues of the boundary-value problem of a differential equation. So if you look for the differential equation which has these matrices you can probably do more with that. They had thought it was a goofy idea and that Hilbert didn't know what he was talking about. So he was having a lot of fun pointing out to them that they could have discovered Schrödinger’s wave mechanics six month earlier if they had paid a little more attention to him.

the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone.

How does Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw choose one idea over another? She asks herself seven questions. Do I have a basic understanding of the area? Do I know something about what is happening in the larger space of that idea? How will I build differentiation, particularly if the idea is a common product? How do I make it affordable and at the same time, deliver high value? Wherever there is a collaborator involved in the ideation process, how do I create larger leverage through the relationship beyond just that one idea? Do I know upfront who will be a paying customer and how I will go about marketing my idea? Finally, do I have conviction about the idea?

Product considerations in Luxury marketing   Ultra luxury products are differentiated from ordinary products through unique aesthetics. An explanation of the quality is best described through omission of words followed by physical evidence and presentation. The brand’s identity should be easily confirmed through a unique sensory experience. A visit

It is rather pointless to go head to head with strong and entrenched competition. But numerous opportunities can be found in the marketplace for a company to maximize its unique qualities, differentiate its products and services, and go after a specific market segment where its competitors are weak and where you can develop superiority, where you can win battles.

As long as the productivity of labor remains at a level where one man can only produce enough for his own subsistence, social division does not take place and any social differentiation within society is impossible. Under these conditions, all men are producers and they are all on the same economic level. Every increase in the productivity of labor beyond this low point makes a small surplus possible, and once there is a surplus of products, once man’s two hands can produce more than is needed for his own subsistence, then the conditions have been set for a struggle over how this surplus will be shared.

Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other. Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural' relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism. All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality. The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.

India is triply disadvantaged. As in many other societies, we suffer from the “head versus hand” hierarchy, which ascribes higher status to purely mental work over work that requires physical labour. In India, that hierarchy is also encoded in caste, with mental labour assigned to dominant castes and physical labour assigned to oppressed ones. A widely held Western idea of art is to restrict anything utilitarian to the realm of craft, says Sainath. ‘A product of craft is something which has constant and wide replication, a specific use, plus a restricted number of patterns. The main differentiation made by many is to look at art as creative, and craft—even when highly skilled—as mechanical and unthinking.

WHAT: Every single company and organization on the planet knows WHAT they do. This is true no matter how big or small, no matter what industry. Everyone is easily able to describe the products or services a company sells or the job function they have within that system. WHATs are easy to identify. HOW: Some companies and people know HOW they do WHAT they do. Whether you call them a “differentiating value proposition,” “proprietary process” or “unique selling proposition,” HOWs are often given to explain how something is different or better. Not as obvious as WHATs, many think these are the differentiating or motivating factors in a decision. It would be false to assume that’s all that is required. There is one missing detail: WHY: Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money—that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? When most organizations or people think, act or communicate they do so from the outside in, from WHAT to WHY. And for good reason—they go from clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. We say WHAT we do, we sometimes say HOW we do it, but we rarely say WHY we do WHAT we do. But not the inspired companies. Not the inspired leaders. Every single one of them, regardless of their size or their industry, thinks, acts and communicates from the inside out.

The rational functions are, by their very nature, incapable of creating symbols, since they produce only rationalities whose meaning is determined unilaterally and does not at the same time embrace its opposite. The sensuous functions are equally unfitted to create symbols, because their products too are determined unilaterally by the object and contain only themselves and not their opposites. To discover, therefore, that impartial basis for the will, we must appeal to another authority, where the opposites are not yet clearly separated but still preserve their original unity. Manifestly this is not the case with consciousness, since the whole essence of consciousness is discrimination, distinguishing ego from non-ego, subject from object, positive from negative, and so forth. The separation into pairs of opposites is entirely due to conscious differentiation; only consciousness can recognize the suitable and distinguish it from the unsuitable and worthless. It alone can declare one function valuable and the other non-valuable, thus bestowing on one the power of the will while suppressing the claims of the other. But, where no consciousness exists, where purely unconscious instinctive life still prevails, there is no reflection, no pro et contra, no disunion, nothing but simple happening, self-regulating instinctivity, living proportion. (Provided, of course, that instinct does not come up against situations to which it is unadapted, in which case blockage, affects, confusion, and panic arise.)

Stalin was the most audible and powerful spokesman in the campaign against what he contemptuously called uravnilovka (leveling). His hostility - voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms - was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin's anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as "fashionable leftists", "blockheads", "petty bourgeois nonsense" and "silly chatter," thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic, and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audience.

The stagnancy of energy, lack of interest in life and creativity, unproductiveness and mediocrity which beset so many people is not the consequence of their genetic and biological programming but of parental and social conditioning. The great Otto Rank acknowledged this and correctly rectified Freud's Thanatos concept. He, like several humanist and existential philosophers and psychologists who came later, realized that our Death Instinct or drive manifests itself in the very repression addressed throughout this book. Repression is a form of violence against the Self. Rank and his followers also realized that man's blind conformity to social norms and lack of differentiation from crowd-consciousness also serves to deaden creativity and productivity. They understood that the robotic organization man, behind his cubicle or on his cell-phone, slaving for some faceless corporation, fully embodies the Death Instinct.

But there are nevertheless three conclusions that seem to follow from our critical examination of the possibilities of inflationary policy. In the first place, all the aims of inflationism can be secured by other sorts of intervention in economic affairs, and secured better, and without undesirable incidental effects. If it is desired to relieve debtors, moratoria may be declared or the obligation to repay loans may be removed altogether; if it is desired to encourage exportation, export premiums may be granted; if it is desired to render importation more difficult, simple prohibition may be resorted to, or import duties levied. All these measures permit discrimination between classes of people, branches of production, and districts, and this is impossible for an inflationary policy. Inflation benefits all debtors, including the rich, and injures all creditors, including the poor; adjustment of the burden of debts by special legislation allows of differentiation. Inflation encourages the exportation of all commodities and hinders all importation; premiums, duties, and prohibitions can be employed discriminatorily.

As an example, let us examine a previously differentiated experience: a sunny day in spring that endless generations before us have often enjoyed. To reproduce the experience, we must consciously differentiate the shapes of the trees, grass, and sky, conforming to the current content of consciousness. We no longer are concerned merely with a spring day, but with our own special, personally coloured spring day. On the other hand, when this differentiated product enters another individual's psyche, a re-transformation occurs. Conscious processing by another involves his personal impressions of a spring day. In addition to conscious processing, the image falls into an unconscious ‘working through', moving the current personal impression down to the ‘Mothers' and dissolving it. In the unconscious, we may find the spring day broken down into its components, the sun, the heavens, and plants that are organized (or perhaps more correctly, moulded) according to mythological forms known to us from folk psychology. In each declaration of a thought, which is a portrait of an image, we establish a generalization in which words are symbols, serving to mould universally human and universally comprehensible ideas around the personal, i.e., the impressions are depersonalized.

In their famous Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx and Engels speak about two phases of communism, the lower and the higher. In the lower one there still prevails the "narrow horizon of bourgeois rights" with its inequality and its wide differentials in individual incomes. Obviously, if in socialism society, according to Marx, still needs to secure the full development of its productive forces until a real economy of wealth and abundance is created, then it has to reward skill and offer incentives. The bureaucrat is in a sense the skilled worker, and there is no doubt that he will place himself on the privileged side of the scale... In practice it proved impossible to establish and maintain the principle proclaimed by the Commune of Paris which served Marx as the guarantee against the rise of bureaucracy, the principle extolled again by Lenin on the eve of October, according to which the functionary should not earn more than the ordinary worker's wage. This principle implied a truly egalitarian society -- and here is part of an important contradiction in the thought of Marx and his disciples. Evidently the argument that no civil servant, no matter how high his function, must earn more than an ordinary worker cannot be reconciled with the other argument that in the lower phase of socialism, which still bears the stamp of "bourgeois rights," it would be utopian to expect "equality of distribution.

To understand how commodity money emerges, we return in more detail to the easy money trap we first introduced in Chapter 1, and begin by differentiating between a good's market demand (demand for consuming or holding the good for its own sake) and its monetary demand (demand for a good as a medium of exchange and store of value). Any time a person chooses a good as a store of value, she is effectively increasing the demand for it beyond the regular market demand, which will cause its price to rise. For example, market demand for copper in its various industrial uses is around 20 million tons per year, at a price of around $5,000 per ton, and a total market valued around $100 billion. Imagine a billionaire deciding he would like to store $10 billion of his wealth in copper. As his bankers run around trying to buy 10% of annual global copper production, they would inevitably cause the price of copper to increase. Initially, this sounds like a vindication of the billionaire's monetary strategy: the asset he decided to buy has already appreciated before he has even completed his purchase. Surely, he reasons, this appreciation will cause more people to buy more copper as a store of value, bringing the price up even more. But even if more people join him in monetizing copper, our hypothetical copper-obsessed billionaire is in trouble. The rising price makes copper a lucrative business for workers and capital across the world. The quantity of copper under the earth is beyond our ability to even measure, let alone extract through mining, so practically speaking, the only binding restraint on how much copper can be produced is how much labor and capital is dedicated to the job.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.

Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature -the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people — all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical in their simplicity. Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word “natural” that we have often taken to mean ”unstructured” in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work.They can all be described by numbers. We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin. And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball. People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything. I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.

timelines register the pain of her loss for the first time. “I’m sorry, honey.” He remembers the day she died, eight weeks ago. She had become almost childlike by that point, her mind gone. He had to feed her, dress her, bathe her. But this was better than the time right before, when she had enough cognitive function left to be aware of her complete confusion. In her lucid moments, she described the feeling as being lost in a dreamlike forest—no identity, no sense of when or where she was. Or alternatively, being absolutely certain she was fifteen years old and still living with her parents in Boulder, and trying to square her foreign surroundings with her sense of place and time and self. She often wondered if this was what her mother felt in her final year. “This timeline—before my mind started to fracture—was the best of them all. Of my very long life. Do you remember that trip we took—I think it was during our first life together—to see the emperor penguins migrate? Remember how we fell in love with this continent? The way it makes you feel like you’re the only people in the world? Kind of appropriate, no?” She looks off camera, says, “What? Don’t be jealous. You’ll be watching this one day. You’ll carry the knowledge of every moment we spent together, all one hundred and forty-four years.” She looks back at the camera. “I need to tell you, Barry, that I couldn’t have made it this long without you. I couldn’t have kept trying to stop the inevitable. But we’re stopping today. As you know by now, I’ve lost the ability to map memory. Like Slade, I used the chair too many times. So I won’t be going back. And even if you returned to a point on the timeline where my consciousness was young and untraveled, there’s no guarantee you could convince me to build the chair. And to what end? We’ve tried everything. Physics, pharmacology, neurology. We even struck out with Slade. It’s time to admit we failed and let the world get on with destroying itself, which it seems so keen on doing.” Barry sees himself step into the frame and take a seat beside Helena. He puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him, her head on his chest. Such a surreal sensation to now remember that day when she decided to record a message for the Barry who would one day merge into his consciousness. “We have four years until doomsday.” “Four years, five months, eight days,” Barry-on-the-screen says. “But who’s counting?” “We’re going to spend that time together. You have those memories now. I hope they’re beautiful.” They are. Before her mind broke completely, they had two good years, which they lived free from the burden of trying to stop the world from remembering. They lived those years simply and quietly. Walks on the icecap to see the Aurora Australis. Games, movies, and cooking down here on the main level. The occasional trip to New Zealand’s South Island or Patagonia. Just being together. A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living. Helena was right. They were the best years of his lives too. “It’s odd,” she says. “You’re watching this right now, presumably four years from this moment, although I’m sure you’ll watch it before then to see my face and hear my voice after I’m gone.” It’s true. He did. “But my moment feels just as real to me as yours does to you. Are they both real? Is it only our consciousness that makes it so? I can imagine you sitting there in four years, even though you’re right beside me in this moment, in my moment, and I feel like I can reach through the camera and touch you. I wish I could. I’ve experienced over two hundred years, and at the end of it all, I think Slade was right. It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment. How we differentiate between past, present, and future. But we’re intelligent enough to be aware of the illusion, even as we live by it, and so,

Differentiation in an existing market can take one of three forms. You can describe differences in product attributes (faster, cheaper, less filling, 30% more), in distribution channel (pizza in 30 minutes, home delivery, see your nearest dealer, build it yourself on the Web), or in service (five-year, 50,000-mile warranty; 90-day money-back guarantee; lifetime warranty).

An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the very least completed course work in basic calculus, algebra and differential equations (the last being one about which most economists are woefully ignorant). This simultaneously explains why neoclassical economists obsess too much about proofs and why non-neoclassical economists, like those in the Circuit School, experience such difficulties in translating excellent verbal ideas about credit creation into coherent dynamic models of a monetary production economy.

People often anchor to one piece of information when making a decision. I almost bought the shirts on sale assuming that the one feature differentiating the two brands — the fact that one was on sale and the other was not — was all I needed to consider.

people, and pets. Always include a caption. Screen Tints — Use screen tints to draw attention to specific areas of copy. This gives the appearance of more than one color when doing one-color printing. Use light backgrounds for maximum readability. Short Words, Sentences, and Paragraphs — Short. Delivers. Punch. Short grabs attention, helps keep the reader reading, and effectively breaks up long copy. Sidebars — Sidebars help hold together — and differentiate — blocks of copy. They are excellent for case studies, testimonials, and product highlights. Simulated Hand-Drawn Doodles — A.k.a. CopyDoodles®. Simulated hand-drawn doodles help draw the reader's eyes to important areas of your copy, add variety and interest to the eye and brain, and create a more personal reading experience. Simulated Handwritten Margin Notes — These

what differentiates a good anything from a great anything you care to think about (business, movie, hotel, product, blog, book, packaging, design, app, talk, school, song, art… keep going) is that the great stuff, the things we give a damn about, have the heart left in them.

Secondly, social infrastructures that help produce labour power of one sort may inhibit the creation of another. Herein lies the logic of residential differentiation in the contemporary metropolis, since neighbourhoods organized for the reproduction of professionals are necessarily different from those given over to the reproduction of blue-collar workers. When super-imposed upon historical, religious, racial and cultural differentiations, this tendency towards geographical specialization in social reproduction can take on even more emphatic form. The processes of social reproduction then crystallize into a relatively permanent patchwork quilt of local, interregional and even international specialization. This patchwork quilt may then also be associated with marked differentials in the value and value-productivity of labour power.

In Lenin's view, such changes were positive: nations, as products of capitalist economic relations, fitted into classic Marxist stage theory of development. Even Stalin, who differed on the implications for Soviet policy, agreed that nations were an inescapable phase through which all humans communities must pass. Ultimately, they (like, capitalism) would be superseded, but for precapitalist societies national development and nationalist movements were treated as progressive. Lenin drew a further distinction between great-power nationalism, which oppressed others, and small-power nationalism, which formed in response o it. In places - such as Russia - that had been responsible for national and colonial oppression of others, nationalism was to be combated without mercy and torn out by the roots. Among groups that had been victims of national or colonial oppression, by contrast-such as in the tsarist imperial periphery, where Russian power had created deep economic, political, and social resentment-the Leninist approach was to build socialism while encouraging indigenous development and national differentiation.

but with complementary skills and know-how for the core team (absolutely the founders) make certain to climb the ladder on the appropriate wall as you’re starting out—that is, identifying and targeting the right growing market add lots of value to your clients/customers through your product and services differentiate clearly what you do in comparison to your competitors, all the while remembering whom you and your team serve keep innovating Furthermore, if you are entrepreneurial, you need to craft and implement a strong marketing and distribution strategy, be a

The differentiated regime, where core (linear) services are clearly regulated and monitored while new and more marginal services are subject to fewer obligations and restrictions, resembles the traditional regime where different media have been subject to different content restrictions based on their assumed cultural impact.11 The proposed EU directive is not yet adopted, but it is interesting to note that both the attempts at liberalization (product placement and advertising breaks) and the suggestion that all services – including on-demand services – should be subject to minimum regulation, have been met with counter-arguments and protests.

As our economy shifts more and more onto an information basis, we are inadvertently creating a divided society. The upper class is composed of those who have mastered the nuances of differentiating between "RAM" and "hard disk." The lower class consists of those who treat the difference as inconsequential. The irony is that the difference really is inconsequential to anyone except a few hard-core engineers. Yet virtually all contemporary software forces its users to confront a file system, where your success is fully dependent on knowing the difference between RAM and disk. Thus the term "computer literacy" becomes a euphemism for social and economic apartheid. Computer literacy is a key phrase that brutally bifurcates our society.

Never Put These Ten Words in Your Pitch Deck Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material. Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.” In particular, go find all instances of the phrase “We work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.” Then hit the delete key. Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “We are exactly the same as everyone else.” Ironically, the more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same. Public relations expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the terms used in company communications, and the results are devastating. Here are the top ten: By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 161,000 companies each think they’re it. More than 75,000 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top”; 30,400 think they’re “unique.” “Solution” also makes an appearance at number seven—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again. If everyone’s saying they offer the “leading solution,” what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: “Great—give me 10 percent off.” We don’t mean to be unsympathetic here. You’ll find it’s hard to avoid these terms—heck, we call our own consulting arm “SEC Solutions”! In all of our time at the Council, we have never once met a member who doesn’t think her company’s value proposition beats the socks off the competitors’. And it’s understandable. After all, why would we want to work for a company whose product is second-rate—especially when our job is to sell that product? But what the utter sameness of language here tells us is that, ironically, a strategy of more precisely describing our products’ advantages over the competition’s is destined to have the exact opposite effect—we simply end up sounding like everyone else.

Our current world I submit that we currently live in a climax stage.21 We have a political model that is based on leading in the popular polls--a model where barely differentiated political leaders pretend to be different by steering voters away from important issues and onto subjects that, albeit emotional, are of little consequence to most people--a model where the election is won by the person with the best marketing, and where consistency and integrity are irrelevant. We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn. We live in a world where the money necessary for our way of life comes out of a slit in the wall as long as we keep showing up for work, yet only experts understand the fiat-based money/credit system. We live in a world where food can be heated in a microwave oven at the touch of a button, yet only experts understand how this works. This goes for most of the other technology we use. All we know is that if we press this or that button, things magically happen. We are aware of large-scale problems, but most of us believe that we can't do anything about them. Instead, we believe in a mythical They who will find a solution, just like They have provided all this wonderful technology we surround ourselves with. We may be more technologically advanced as a group, and correctly but myopically hold up technology as our one indicator of "progress,"22 but in terms of individual understanding we have not come far, and once again live according to old concepts. In fact, we might have turned a full cycle from the last climax stage: The Dark Ages.

Functions of advertising To differentiate the product from their competitors To communicate product information To urge product used To expand the product distribution Too increase brand preference and loyalty To reduce overall sales cost Creates new demands

In the aforementioned Intellectual Birdhouse, which focuses on artistic practice as research, Michael Schwab examines the role of the artists' artist and, in doing so, extends Foster's reflections when discussing 'love value' over exchange value. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu among others, Schwab describes what values the new archival context suggests for institutions that are looking to recoup their losses: "the 'artists' artist' is too epistemologically demanding on the market, which fails to capitalize (often during the lifetime of the artist) on the symbolic value that is produced while he or she delivers epistemological gain to his or her peers, who appear to be the only ones who are able to perceive such value in advance of the market." Schwab is arguing that the role of the artist in the production of knowledge through artistic research extends and can be differentiated from symbolic value. It is not the market that distinguishes the value of an artist to the artist, it is their epistemic value. In other words, it is what we can learn from that artist, not just their artworks. This produces a dilemma for the established institution that struggles to identifY the cultural significance and value of the 'artists' artist' until late, sometimes too late, in the lifetime of the subject. It is not necessarily just a lack of vision on the part of museum staff, archivists and curators, but the values these institutions are increasingly forced to place on spectacular exhibitions in order to survive through corporate and media driven sponsored relations. Archivists themselves acknowledge this limitation of working within institutions that have little room to speculate on cultural value except through established forms, such as the emerging contemporary markets. Many seek out and must work in new emerging archives, such as Flat Time House. However, I would also argue that it is the artist's understanding of the potential value of' 'becomingness' through cultural capital that applies to the present moment too. As has been stated by Derrida, the 'vision' to see what needs to be archived is now the work of the artist/s: to anticipate the archive itself. (excerpt from Experiments and Archives in the Expanded Field written by Neal White)

In the early days of supply chain management, manufacturing and distribution processes were insourced. Companies owned their bricks and mortar, and products were made and sold within the same region. Today’s supply chain is largely outsourced. Manufacturing

Whereas previously men were differentiated only by their culture, the community is all of sudden split into economically determined classes and, with the cheap products of the factory, a poverty without beauty invades the homes; ugly, senseless, and comfortless poverty is the most widespread of all modern achievements.

if salespeople want to sell value and differentiate their product, they have to deliver insight that will reframe the buying vision so buyers end up with the solution that helps them overcome their challenges and achieve their goals.

try to soften the differentiator. You might ask, “How do you measure machine speed? Do you mean speed for continuous run, or speed for a one-off job? Some machines are very fast under continuous run conditions, but they perform much more slowly if you have one-off production needs.

As every barrier to the constraint of individualism is removed - as 'I' and 'my' appear in the names of more and more software applications and IT products - nevertheless today's rampant mimeticism ensures that 'I' and 'my' become less and less differentiated from 'you' and 'yours'...We crave differentiation, and deprived of it we blame the failing institutions that once might have delivered it.

market alternatives call out the budget and thus the market category, and product alternatives call out the differentiation.

I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.

More specifically the typical process steps are as follows: Hypothesis development: Innovation teams start with identifying the white space. They ask questions like “Where can we create and deliver differentiated value?” and “Which markets are underserved?

I’ve seen many small businesses completely misunderstand their marketplace because they didn’t want to believe that their products or services were missing the mark, or they didn’t want to make the necessary investments for course corrections, or they simply didn’t offer the innovation or differentiation that they thought they did.

Identities are a contested terrain, both a product of individuals’ spontaneous, common sense self-understanding and political choices that help them make sense of their existence, and a product of labelling from above (e.g. by employers and by the state) or by their peers; i.e. the effects of acts of power. It is important, therefore, to differentiate between ‘legitimating identities’, which are the product of dominant institutions and groups, and ‘resistance identities’, which emerge from the grassroots

WE HAVE BEEN very interested in physical stores for years, but I always said we were only interested in having a differentiated offering, something that’s not me-too, because that space—physical stores—is so well served. If we had a me-too product offering, I knew it wasn’t going to work. Our culture is much better at pioneering and inventing, and so we have to have something that’s different. And that’s what Amazon Go is.

It’s completely different. The Amazon Bookstore, completely different. And we have ideas about how to merge Prime and Whole Foods to make Whole Foods a very differentiated experience. Amazon buys a lot of companies. Usually they’re much smaller than Whole Foods, but we buy a bunch of companies every year. When I meet with the entrepreneur who founded the company, I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost: Is this person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customers, and they’re trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money, and you can tell really quickly just by talking to people. Whole Foods is a missionary company, and John Mackey, the

Earlier I mentioned that Newton and Jobs were great synthesizers. Newton brought together planetary astronomy, laws of motion, differential mathematics—ideas developed by others—and synthesized them into a coherent whole the world hadn’t seen. Jobs brought together design, marketing, and technology into a coherent whole, as few others could do. But he was missing a key ingredient. Like Land before him, who brought similar skills together, Jobs had led only as a Moses. Which is why the most valuable gift that Jobs received—from the perspective of Apple product lovers today—was not the financial reward of his Pixar investment. It was seeing the Bush-Vail rules in action. He learned a different model for leading, for how to nurture loonshots and grow franchises while balancing the tensions between the two. That missing ingredient became the key to his third act, when he returned to hardware and revived his previous company—along with the entire American consumer electronics industry.

Endocrine disruptors like Bisphenol A, which is found in plastic water bottles and the linings of canned foods, are chemicals that can affect sexual orientation and behavior. A report by the National Library of Medicine stated, “Bisphenol A (BPA) is an estrogenic endocrine disruptor widely used in the production of plastics. Increasing evidence indicates that in utero BPA exposure affects sexual differentiation and behavior…We hypothesized that BPA may disrupt epigenetic programming of gene expression in the brain…BPA exposure induced persistent, largely sex-specific effects on social and anxiety-like behavior, leading to disruption of sexually dimorphic behaviors.”232

In today’s noisy marketplace, we need business storytelling more than ever to differentiate brands, products, and services. Too often, companies rely on description alone when marketing something. There’s a tendency to think that describing something is selling something. But it’s not. Description doesn’t create meaning. It creates information. Stories create meaning.

use this method of airframe shock testing in economic engineering, the prices of commodities are shocked, and the public consumer reaction is monitored. The resulting echoes of the economic shock are interpreted theoretically by computers and the psycho-economic structure of the economy is thus discovered. It is by this process that partial differential and difference matrices are discovered that define the family household and make possible its evaluation as an economic industry (dissipative consumer structure). Then the response of the household to future shocks can be predicted and manipulated, and society becomes a well-regulated animal with its reins under the control of a sophisticated computer-regulated social energy bookkeeping system. “Eventually every individual element of the structure comes under computer control through a knowledge of personal preferences, such know ledge guaranteed by computer association of consumer preferences (universal product code — UPC — zebra-stripe pricing codes on packages) with identified consumers (identified via association with the use of a credit card and later a permanent “tatooed” body number [WC emphasis] invisible under normal ambient illumination.… THE ECONOMIC MODEL “...The Harvard Economic Research Project (1948-) was an extension of World War II Operations Research. Its purpose was to discover the science of controlling an economy: at first the American economy, and then the world economy. It was felt that with sufficient mathematical foundation and data, it would be nearly as easy to predict and control the trend of an economy as to predict and control the trajectory of a projectile. Such has proven to be the case. Moreover, the economy has been transformed into a guided missile on target.

New product (or service) platforms combine various technologies, some of which are new and others that are existing. These product platforms can have many dimensions of change, such as changes in cost, quality, or performance, and can offer dramatically new and unique benefits. Examples of such platform products include the Sony Walkman, which developed a new technology, or the Apple iTunes that legally combined multiple technologies and products to create a blockbuster platform. These product platforms are less risky and cheaper to develop than revolutionary products but with more potential and differentiation than evolutionary advances. Steve Jobs was the master at this, having developed platform products like the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone.

when these two factors - product differentiation and capacity constraints - are combined, the sky becomes the limit

At the same time, by eliminating many of the most costly elements of the circus, it dramatically reduced its cost structure, achieving both differentiation and low cost. Cirque strategically priced its tickets against those of the theater, lifting the price point of the circus industry by several multiples while still pricing its productions to capture the mass of adult customers, who were used to theater prices.

WHAT: Every single company and organization on the planet knows WHAT they do. This is true no matter how big or small, no matter what industry. Everyone is easily able to describe the products or services a company sells or the job function they have within that system. WHATs are easy to identify. HOW: Some companies and people know HOW they do WHAT they do. Whether you call them a “differentiating value proposition,” “proprietary process” or “unique selling proposition,” HOWs are often given to explain how something is different or better. Not as obvious as WHATs, many think these are the differentiating or motivating factors in a decision. It would be false to assume that’s all that is required. There is one missing detail: WHY: Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money—that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?

Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.

If a company adds too many novel ideas too often, it can have a similar impact on the product or category as the price game. In an attempt to differentiate with more features, the products start to look and feel more like commodities. And, like price, the need to add yet another product to the line to compensate for the commoditization ends in a downward spiral.

Chinese companies don’t have this kind of luxury. Surrounded by competitors ready to reverse-engineer their digital products, they must use their scale, spending, and efficiency at the grunt work as a differentiating factor. They burn cash like crazy and rely on armies of low-wage delivery workers to make their business models work. It’s a defining trait of China’s alternate internet universe that leaves American analysts entrenched in Silicon Valley orthodoxy scratching their heads.

Just as Grant borrowed heavily from Houston Chamberlain, so did Stoddard borrow heavily from Grant in The Revolt Against Civilization, adding generous doses of Lombrosian-style statistical surveys to prove that the new immigrants were systematically undermining the racial future of America.* Stoddard’s Nordic type exhibited a remarkable fusion of neo-Gobinian and specifically American virtues. Nordic man was “at once democratic and aristocratic…. Profoundly individualistic and touchy about his personal rights, neither he nor his fellows will tolerate tyranny.” He was naturally averse to degeneration: “He requires healthful living conditions, and pines when deprived of good food, fresh air, and exercise.” His racial purity becomes the key to progress as well, since “our modern scientific age is mainly a product of Nordic genius.” All the nations with high infusions of Nordic blood were, according to Stoddard, “the most progressive as well as the most energetic and politically able.89 But Stoddard also dared to confront the paradox that underlay the Gobinian confrontation between cultural vitality and civilization. Even as a healthy racial stock generates society’s material wealth and cultural attainments, Gobineau had claimed, its openness to change and diversity sows the seeds of its own destruction. Ultimately the people discover that “their social environment has outrun inherited capacity.” The Anglo-Saxon heritage cannot sustain itself in the future without its racial stock. (Grant was also a keen eugenicist.) “The more complex the society and the more differentiated the stock,” Stoddard insisted, “the graver the liability of irreparable disaster.

And it all starts from the inside out. It all starts with Why. Before we can explore its applications, let me first define the terms, starting from the outside of the circle and moving inward. WHAT: Every single company and organization on the planet knows WHAT they do. This is true no matter how big or small, no matter what industry. Everyone is easily able to describe the products or services a company sells or the job function they have within that system. WHATs are easy to identify. HOW: Some companies and people know HOW they do WHAT they do. Whether you call them a "differentiating value proposition," "proprietary process" or "unique selling proposition," HOWs are often given to explain how something is different or better. Not as obvious as WHATs, many think these are the differentiating or motivating factors in a decision. It would be false to assume that's all that is required. There is one missing detail: WHY: Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don't mean to make money—that's a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? When most organizations or people think, act or communicate they do so from the outside in, from WHAT to WHY. And for good reason—they go from clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. We say WHAT we do, we sometimes say HOW we do it, but we rarely say WHY we do WHAT we do. But not the inspired companies. Not the inspired leaders. Every single one of them, regardless of their size or their industry, thinks, acts and communicates from the inside out

I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.

When I started exploring what flag I should plant back in 2009, there was a confluence of events in the works. The business world was increasingly using a methodology called Agile as its preferred product-development process while, at the same time, digital design was becoming increasingly important. Technology was rapidly evolving, and design was becoming a key differentiating factor for success—this was just a couple of years after the introduction of the iPhone. Companies were struggling to figure out how to integrate these two trends successfully, which created an opportunity for me—no one had solved this problem. This is where I decided to plant my flag—because I had the expertise, the opportunity, a real problem to solve that many people were dealing with, and the credibility to speak to it. I decided to work on solving this challenge and to bring everyone willing along with me on my journey. My teams and I started experimenting, trying different ways of working. We often failed, but as we were going through our ups and downs, I was sharing—publicly writing and giving talks about—what we were trying to do. Turned out I wasn’t the only one struggling with this issue. The more I wrote and the more I presented, the more widely I became known out in the world as someone who was not only working to solve this issue, but who was a source of ideas, honesty, and inspiration. So, when I left TheLadders, I had already planted my flag. I had found the thing I wanted to be known for and the work I was passionate about. A quick word of warning… Success on this path is a double-edged sword and you should approach this process with eyes open. The flag you plant today may very well be with you for the rest of your life—especially if you build widespread credibility on the topic. It’s going to follow you wherever you go and define you. No matter what else I do out in the world, I will forever be Jeff Gothelf—the Lean UX guy.

We had to figure out a way to come up with big innovations, embrace change, and invent new services and products that would differentiate us from our competition and would let us grow faster than our industry. We were waiting for big ideas instead of using a system to innovate.

Take as much time as possible preparing for retirement while you’re still working. It is the single biggest differentiator between success and struggle.

If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth. The Devil, who brought Gold and Wealth (the price of which was our soul), has been supplanted by Affluence pure and simple. And the pact with the Devil has been supplanted by the contract of Affluence. Moreover, just as the most diabolical aspect of the Devil has never been his existing, but his making us believe that he exists, so Affluence does not exist, but it only has to make us believe it exists to be an effective myth. Consumption is a myth. That is to say, it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself. And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption; it is this reflexive, discursive configuration, endlessly repeated in everyday speech and intellectual discourse, which has acquired the force of common sense. Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea. This is not a supplementary dimension; it is a fundamental one, for it is the dimension of myth. If we did nothing but consume (getting, devouring, digesting), consumption would not be a myth, which is to say that it would not be a full, self-fulfilling discourse of society about itself, a general system of interpretation, a mirror in which it takes supreme delight in itself, a utopia in which it is reflected in advance. In this sense, affluence and consumption – again, we mean not the consumption of material goods, products and services, but the consumed image of consumption – do, indeed, constitute our new tribal mythology – the morality of modernity. Without that anticipation and reflexive potentialization of enjoyment in the ‘collective consciousness’, consumption would merely be what it is and would not be such a force for social integration. It would merely be a richer, more lavish, more differentiated mode of subsistence than before, but it would no more have a name than ever it did before, when nothing designated as collective value, as reference myth what was merely a mode of survival (eating, drinking, housing and clothing oneself) or the sumptuary expenditure (finery, great houses, jewels) of the privileged classes. Neither eating roots nor throwing feasts was given the name ‘consuming’. Our age is the first in which current expenditure on food and ‘prestige’ expenditure have both been termed consumption by everyone concerned, there being a total consensus on the matter. The historic emergence of the myth of consumption in the twentieth century is radically different from the emergence of the technical concept in economic thinking or science, where it was employed much earlier. That terminological systematization for everyday use changes history itself: it is the sign of a new social reality. Strictly speaking, there has been consumption only since the term has ‘passed into general usage’. Though it is mystifying and analytically useless – a veritable ‘anti-concept’ indeed – it signifies, nonetheless, that an ideological restructuring of values has occurred. The fact that this society experiences itself as a consumer society must be the starting point for an objective analysis

Furthermore, we humans in particular have conscience apart from consciousness. We have ability to differentiate right from wrong. We have self-awareness. If we are result of genetic mutations alone without any Creator and we have come to exist as the fittest species, then is there any harm or anything wrong if we mutate or destroy other life-forms. If water is scarce and we do not want to change our lifestyles and industrial production of unnecessary goods, then what is wrong if we kill few thousand camels instead? For that matter, even human populations. Why is that wrong in the evolutionary biology story where we start from inanimate matter and then decompose into a debris of matter again eventually.

We have a system we follow every time we get asked to create a product logo. Clients like the work we produce and we’re able to charge a good dollar because clients know a product logo is something they will use for a long time. Once we create one product logo, we have our foot in the door and clients often come back as they launch new products.” Ted considered Alex’s conclusion. “Tell me about the system you follow for creating logos.” “It’s nothing too formal, but we always start off by asking the client to describe their vision for their product and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.” Ted began to make notes. “That sounds like a good first step. Let’s call it Visioning.” Step 1: Visioning “What’s the next step?” asked Ted. “After we establish the client’s goals, we go through an exercise where we ask the client to personify their product. For example, we’ll ask questions like, ‘If your product was a famous actor, who would it be?’ and ‘If your product was a rock star, who would it be?’ One of our favorite questions is a little goofy: ‘If your product was a cookie, what kind of cookie would it be?’ These questions force the client to think about the personality they want to come through in their logo.” “That sounds unique, Alex. Let’s call that step two and give it a name like Personification.” Step 2: Personification “What’s your next step in designing a logo?” “We then go back to the office and use a pencil and paper to freehand sketch

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. No matter how strong your product—even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately—you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.

Another source of evidence that violence can be prevented comes from the experience of those religious sub-cultures that practice "primitive Christian communism," such as the Anabaptist sects — the Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites. These are classless societies with essentially no inequities of income or wealth and virtually no private property, since they pool their economic resources and share them equally. They also experience virtually no physical violence, either individual or collective. The Hutterites, for example, since emigrating from eastern Europe to escape religious persecution around 1874, have lived in communal farms in southern Canada and the north-mid western United States for more than a century. As strict pacifists, that was their only alternative to extermination. Thus, they have no history of collective violence (warfare). They "consider themselves to live the only true form of Christianity, one which entails communal sharing of property and cooperative production and distribution of goods," as Kaplan and Plaut described them in Personality in a Communal Society (1955). That is, they conform to the pattern of the earliest Christian communities, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (2: 44-45): "all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." As a result, the Hutterites experienced "virtually no differentiation of class, income, or standard of living... This society comes as close as to being classless as any we know." (Kaplan and Plaut). An intensive review by medical and social scientists of their well-documented behavioral history and vital statistics during the century since their arrival in North America reported that "We did not find a single case of murder, assault or rape. Physical aggressiveness of any sort was quite rate." (Eaton and Weil, Culture and Mental Disorders, 1955.) Hostetler, writing twenty years later, reported that there still had not been a single homicide in the 100 years since the Hutterites entered North America, and only one suicide in a population of about 21,000 (Hutterite Society, 1974).

I cite here, again, Gilmore’s definition: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

Lyotard addresses... in Postmodern Fables... [that] ideas of difference, alterity and multiculturalism have become nothing more than streams of cultural capital, streams which themselves fashion, and are fashioned by, the demands of the global market. Hence, the following irony: 'What cultural capitalism has found is the marketplace of singularities'. The result of this discovery, which even reduces the 'postmodern' celebration of difference or otherness to a marketable strategy, is that ideas are stripped of their intrinsic value (value-rationality) and are judged by their value as commodities. This leads to the production of thought that is itself devoid of difference, for streams of cultural capital 'must all go in the right direction' and 'must converge'. Global capitalism, while appearing to affirm the potentiality of cultural differentiation, in fact subordinates difference and alterity to an instrumental logic of exchange, performance and control.

Compare Bethlehem Steel to Nucor. Both companies operated in the steel industry and produced hard-to-differentiate products. Both companies faced the competitive challenge of cheap imported steel. Yet executives at the two companies had completely different views of the same environment. Bethlehem Steel’s CEO summed up the company’s problems in 1983 by blaming imports: “Our first, second, and third problems are imports.”51 Ken Iverson and his crew at Nucor considered the same challenge from imports a blessing, a stroke of good fortune (“Aren’t we lucky; steel is heavy, and they have to ship it all the way across the ocean, giving us a huge advantage!”). Iverson saw the first, second, and third problems facing the American steel industry not to be imports, but management.52 He even went so far as to speak out publicly against government protection against imports, telling a stunned gathering of fellow steel executives in 1977 that the real problems facing the American steel industry lay in the fact that management had failed to keep pace with innovation.53 The

Price plays a larger role in the positioning of stores than it does in the positioning of brands. Price rarely provides a differential advantage for product brands: indeed, the more expensive brands are often category leaders, like Tropicana in chilled fruit juice, Pampers in disposable nappies (diapers) and Danone in Greek yogurt. In contrast, the price perception of a large retailing chain is a cornerstone of its image. This

If competitors are determined to grow in a static market, they may start to break the orderly market rules. Producing copies of rivals’ products is tempting because in the short term it ‘steals’ share and makes money. Although competitors with strong technological and marketing skills are unlikely to launch exact copies of rival brands, it is estimated that 97% of new products are not genuine innovations.6 The failure rate of new products is extremely high, around 90% two years after launch, so even though differentiated brands on the whole perform better than me-toos, me-toos are common in markets where innovation is slowing down. Once they get a hold in an industry, there is an inevitable downward pressure on prices.

Role of quality: The quality of the shopping experience provides weaker differential advantages than quality can bring to product brands, but it can still have an impact. As retailers add new services, such as banking, insurance etc., they can strengthen the quality of the shopping experience and enter new markets. Brands,

Creativity is to ads as product quality is to cars, airplanes and electronic equipment – it’s absolutely necessary, and it needs to be built-in to the product, but it is not the only factor that matters, and it hardly provides sustainable differentiation from one agency to another. True, one agency will be “hot” for a given period and will grow and win business (one thinks of Crispin Porter + Bogusky or mcgarrybowen in recent years), but then the wheel turns, and the hot creative agencies of today become targets for other upstarts – like Droga5, 72andSunny, or Anomaly – and are eventually superseded in the same way that professional tennis stars are eventually vanquished at Wimbledon.

Stay humble and customer-focused. No matter what business you are in, you are serving your customers. You differentiate yourself by how well you satisfy, and keep satisfying, your customers’ needs. Don’t become so enamored with your idea or product that you believe it will “sell itself.” There is always a better widget waiting in the wings. What will make your ideas successful is your personal ability to convince customers that you stand behind what you are selling.

My target customer will be? (Tip: how would you describe your primary target customer) The problem my customer wants to solve is? (Tip: what does your customer struggle with or what need do they want to fulfill) My customer’s need can be solved with? (Tip: give a very concise description / elevator pitch of your product) Why can’t my customer solve this today? (Tip: what are the obstacles that have prevented my customer from solving this already) The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? (Tip: what measurable change in your your customer’s life makes them love your product) My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? (Tip: you will likely have multiple marketing channels, but there is often one method, at most two, that dominates your customer acquisition — what is your current guess) My earliest adopter will be? (Tip: remember that you can’t get to the mainstream customer without getting early adopters first) I will make money (revenue) by? (Tip: don’t list all the ideas for making money, but pick your primary one) My primary competition will be? (Tip: think about both direct and indirect competition) I will beat my competitors primarily because of? (Tip: what truly differentiates you from the competition?) My biggest risk to financial viability is? (Tip: what could prevent you from getting to breakeven? is there something baked into your revenue or cost model that you can de-risk?) My biggest technical or engineering risk is? (Tip: is there a major technical challenge that might hinder building your product?)

How do online retailers use these insights about shopper visits? Moe: The next stage of research looks at differentiating between online shoppers not just according to what pages they are looking at, but by also actually examining the products they are interested in.7 In other words, what are the characteristics of the products they are searching for and interested in? And what are their ideal products? Building a model based on data from this research enables the retailer to estimate the probability of purchasing. For example, if someone looks only at a series of black shoes, you can infer that she has a clear preference for this color shoe. Someone else might be looking only at shoes in a certain price range.

When an engineer with years of familiarity in a problem space begins designing a product, it’s easy to imagine a utopian end-state for the work. However, it’s important to differentiate aspirational goals of the product from minimum success criteria (or Minimum Viable Product). Projects can lose credibility and fail by promising too much,

Everything economic science posits as given, that is, the range of dispositions of the economic agent which ground the illusion of the ahistorical universality of the categories and concepts employed by that science, is, in fact, the paradoxical product of a long collective history, endlessly reproduced in individual histories, which can be fully accounted for only by historical analysis: it is because history has inscribed these concomitantly in social and cognitive structures, practical patterns of thinking, perception and action, that it has conferred the appearance of natural, universal self-evidence on the institutions economics claims to theorize ahistorically; it has done this by, among other things, the amnesia of genesis that is encouraged, in this field as in others, by the immediate accord between the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’, between dispositions and positions, between anticipations (or hopes) and opportunities. Against the ahistorical vision of economics, we must, then, reconstitute, on the one hand, the genesis of the economic dispositions of economic agents and, especially, of their tastes, needs, propensities or aptitudes (for calculation, saving or work itself) and, on the other, the genesis of the economic field itself, that is to say, we must trace the history of the process of differentiation and autonomization which leads to the constitution of this specific game: the economic field as a cosmos obeying its own laws and thereby conferring a (limited) validity on the radical autonomization which pure theory effects by constituting the economic sphere as a separate world. It was only very gradually that the sphere of commodity exchange separated itself out from the other fields of existence and its specific nomos asserted itself – the nomos expressed in the tautology ‘business is business’; that economic transactions ceased to be conceived on the model of domestic exchanges, and hence as governed by social or family obligations (‘there’s no sentiment in business’); and that the calculation of individual gain, and hence economic interest, won out as the dominant, if not indeed exclusive, principle of business against the collectively imposed and controlled repression of calculating inclinations associated with the domestic economy. The

While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations

As you'll soon see, coming up with winning products is never easy. We need a product that our customers love, yet also works for our business. However, a very large component of what is meant by works for our business is that there is a real market there (large enough to sustain a business), we can successfully differentiate from the many competitors out there, we can cost‐effectively acquire and engage new customers, and we have the go‐to‐market channels and capabilities required to get our product into the hands of our customers.

Here are the types of questions I consider asking during product analysis: What is the nature of the product? (What are its benefits? Why would someone buy it?) Is it a commodity good or a unique good? (Could the company increase differentiation?) Are there any complementary goods? (Can the company piggyback off growth in complements or near complements?) Are there any substitutes? (Is the company vulnerable to indirect competitors, namely substitutes?) What is the product’s life cycle? (Is it new or almost obsolete?) How is it packaged? (This is an optional question. Is anything bundled or included with the product—for example, just a razor versus a razor with replacement blades, or just a product versus a product with a service contract? Would a change in the product’s packaging make the product more likely to meet specific consumer segments’ needs?) If you selectively ask questions about these product-related topics, you can uncover insights that will help you refine your hypotheses and ultimately serve your client more effectively.