Lloyd Fassett (lloydfassett)

That is so oddly true.....it's like the murkiness of decision points makes people consider something, or someone, who has been persistent just because of name recognition....it's like the power of a brand, which I think can add 10% to a product category. I'm in Talent Acquisition and for a long time have wondered about how your friend, or even friend of a friend, gets hired before someone you don't know just because assessing skills is damn near impossible and the comforting trust factor of relationships. There are a ton of military examples too, like General Võ Nguyên Giáp. He was the North Vietnamese commander who surrounded the French at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, hauling artillery up jungle-covered mountains the French believed were impossible to fortify. The French didn't think it could be done is like suddenly surprising people by being persistent enough. Persistence won't win, but it's a key ingredient you frequently can't do without, to make the underlying facts have an impact.

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Have you read Siddhartha by Herman Hess?

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ITAP Eastern Sierras outside of Bridgeport at sunrise

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Great question. I'd say everyone didn't understand the 'persona' of their users at all. A part of the answer is understanding why Sergey, Larry and Vinod Khosla tried to sell Google to Excite @ Home who wouldn't pay $1 million for it. All those key players in that story didn't see what you're asking for. I think they were still assuming the future looked like newspapers...ala Yahoo because, certainly the curation of professional content development would be why. It seems to me the unstated assumption was they history would rhyme. It didn't that time around at that level. If they dug deeper into what the user really wanted, what the problem they were solving was, they might have seen the market differently. It's great to ask that question, because that question is like physics for business. The basics, like physics, will stay the same but the solutions can evolve. The answer in business terms is looking at the problem you're solving deeper than the user can possibly be aware of how it can be solved.

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