Can small be the new big?
This week I'm interested in contrasts and how they opens up opportunities if we're curious. Some, like scaling intimacy are seemingly intractable. Others, a matter of iteration and innovation.
Can intimacy scale?
In the world of work and technology the hype focuses on massive growth and scale. For if you don't scale, you don't reap the big payday. Small and one-off just doesn't deliver outsized returns. Often this is at the expense of culture and service.
The millions of small endeavors are not celebrated because the thing we reward is size and money. Yet on an individual level, we love boutique and custom and personal. We love small because it makes us feel seen, heard, appreciated. Hard to feel appreciated when you're just one of many.
When you're employed in a large enterprise, it's also hard to feel your impact. Much easier when you're part of a start-up. Where there's no redundancy and everyone's work impacts the success of company. Where you're missed when you're not there.
That's why it's healthy to have and know your purpose.
I'm not telling you something you likely don't already know. Nor I'm I advocating for all small over big. We need both. You can't get the depth and breath of services that empower the small without the big. It'd be cost prohibitive in a world where the small has access to the tools that only the largest could touch. How cool is that?
Our brains are wired to notice the dramatic.
To celebrate the biggest wins. And dwell on the biggest losses. Yet minimize the power of the little things that make up the whole. Whether that's the millions of small businesses that make up our economy or the many many players that make a big company tick. You have to see beneath the superficial.
Ask yourself this question: How can you celebrate small? How can you find or create opportunity for intimacy if that's what most of us want? It's clear that intimacy doesn't scale. At least not as it's been shown so far. If you're growing your Instagram following you'll reach a point where it's overwhelming to interact with everyone. It sucks up a ton of time. Yet your tribe craves such interaction. At some point, whether it's 2,000, 5,000, or 10,000 followers, you just can't personally respond to everyone. I am not at that point with mine, but know of some passing 2K who are feeling the pinch. A blessing and a curse it is.
You can't exactly clone yourself. And I don't have the magic fix for this, but there's opportunity here. Opportunity to create intimacy with scale. Solving this would create massive rewards for you and benefit many. The constraint of time is powerful. Investing in a way to make it work for rather than against you would be cool. I wish you would do it because I'd love to see how it can be done.
How might you reimagine intimacy that scales? What would that feel like to you in the areas you work in? What if small was the new big?
Curiosity can save lives
If this seems impossible to solve, consider what Dr. Martine Rothblatt was up against for saving her daughter. It started when her daughter was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare usually fatal disease. Doctors gave her three months to live. Not willing to accept that, she dove into medical journals to understand the disease and look for possible cures. One footnote lead to another and another until she stumbled upon a molecule developed by GlaxoSmithKline that may hold the clue.
Problem was, they didn't want to develop it thinking it not commercially viable because there were only 2,000 cases a year, and the odds are stacked against success. They also didn't want to just turn it over to someone outside the industry. They said they would for $25k if she had a pharmaceutical industry so she started one, found a scientist that would develop it and found it successful. Took several years and her daughter fortunately lived long enough to take the drug and manage the disease. Turns out there is a much larger market than initially forecast and it returns $1 billion annually as there's still no cure patients must continue taking the drug, Remodulin. Catch her story in full detail on Tim Ferris’ podcast.
This is the power of curiosity, tenacity and resilience. Of not accepting no. While not all endeavors are life-saving, it should show you why it's a skill you need to prize. Don't worry about it killing the cat either.
Preserving vs. Building
How many projects have you seen that raised funding for the initial construction or installation, but neglected to consider sustaining it? It's hard enough to get the funds to create. But you have a sexy visual and story from which to solicit. It's much harder and much less rewarding to talk about how you need money to keep it going. For one thing, it's not always clear how you'll need. And who wants to write a big check for maintenance?
Yet if you kick the can down the curb, it'll come to bite someone at some point.
I once lived in an HOA with an olympic-sized pool and rec center. 30 years on, the pool was failing and held together literally with duct tape. It was the crown jewel of the are and there were no funds available for replacing it. And so it closed shortly after we moved into the neighborhood. For several years the debate raged for what to do and how to pay for it.
What about the many Chateaus being reclaimed by nature because people have moved on? Imagine if this one hadn't been neglected over the years how much less it would cost to maintain.
Or Detroit. Beautiful old (and not even that old by European standards) buildings cast aside. Here are just 13 buildings destroyed for no good reason.
It finally landed on an option that worked for the majority but it wasn't easy. Imagine if replacement was planned in advance? Imagine if preservation was valued as much as creation? I wonder if that would help solve the climate crisis, protect the environment and save us money? Imagine the opportunity for work? Imagine almost a self-renewing society. One that builds and plans for the long term. Not just the present.
Or this former spa-hotel in Germany built in 1900 and abandoned in 2012:
Sure, we can't know it all in advance. In construction, maintenance costs average 4.5% - 7.5% of annual operating costs. For every $1 in deferred maintenance you can expect $4 in repair costs down the road according to CHT Healthcare's research. https://www.chthealthcare.com/blog/deferred-maintenance When you consider the building lifecycle and not just the initial construction, it changes how you think. How you solve for today. The same with building enduring brands rather than flipping companies like people flip houses. With a short-term focus, employees and customers get the short straw.
The Portland Building designed by Michael Graves was done on the cheap. They wanted a starchitect but lacked the budget to realize the vision, leaving it with severe structural issues and a lack of light. It was dark and inhuman to work in. Built for $29 million in the early 1980s it's currently under reconstruction for nearly $195 million including the cost of housing city employees elsewhere during the process. That's after $13 million already spent on fixing it years before. Imagine if it had been properly built and funded what this money could do for the city?
While I've focused on construction, think about the lifecycle of a company and a culture. Built with intention, a company will attract the best talent and enjoy greater productivity which leads to higher profitability. This can then be reinvested in growth and their people. It's a virtuous cycle. Yet not one considered in the quest to make the quarter's numbers. Or when the rewards focus on today's performance over tomorrows.
We humans are procrastinators. If it's too hard, we'll put it off. If it requires too much political capital, we won't stick our neck out. There's always another day we say.
Deferring maintenance of any kind snowballs your costs. Just like it's harder and more costly to get healthy when you haven't maintained your body, it's harder to keep a building or a company healthy when neglected. Any pursuit worth doing requires consistent practice. How would you reimagine your work through this lens?
Play to your strengths
I was talking this last week with someone who talked about how they preferred working with people more than data. The context was around how to grow their D2C business and using data to make good choices. He knows he's not the one to exuberantly scour the data for for insights. He'd rather tell the story. That means he should find someone who loves the data side as much as he loves storytelling and then collaborate. This taps the 80/20 rule and how you get more done when you do what you enjoy doing. Have you assessed what you're best at and what you should let go of to do more of that? What would it take to go deep and exponentially increase your impact?