Author: MIKE

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Three stories, the same message.

How Glen Powell ended up with the role of Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick.

How Estée Lauder ended up in Harrods.

David Senra tells the story in Founders #217. First Lauder goes to Harrods. No one talks to her. So, she thinks a little media attention will help. She does some interviews, goes back to Harrods, no one talks to her. She returns to America.

Lauder returns a year later. She asks. ‘No’. More media, she asks again, ““she talks to the same buyer. This is a year later. She was not as quite as hostile, but she says, let me tell you, I have no room here as I told you before, she said, but perhaps I could take a tiny order and put it in with the general toiletries.”

More media, and the customers started to show up.

How Kind Bars ended up in Walmart.

Daniel Lubetzky’s path to starting Kind was long, wandering, and full of two-steps forward one-step back moments. One was the first time Kind got into Walmart. It wasn’t in the bar section. It wasn’t in the health foods. It was in the candy bar section.

This was disappointing but a blessing in disguise. Kind lacked the organizational structure required for serving large customers. The bars took a long time to take off – which was good. Once they did Walmart and Kind ended their partnership. It was too much too soon – but a lesson in what the company needed next.

Everyone is a genius in a bull market, but is it easier to choose bull markets than be a genius?

There are no facts, only feelings

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The stickiest idea from How Minds Change by David McRaney (and I hope I’m understanding this correctly) is that idea that we don’t actually know anything. We only have feelings.

There are fifty states in America. Cook chicken to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Increase your weekly running mileage by 10%, or risk injury.

These are all things I used to consider facts. Now, I don’t know.

According to McRaney, there’s a subconscious level. On this level are our feelings. We don’t know about states, cooking temperatures, or running programs – we only feel what is right. We evolved (using memes) to survive. A crucial piece of survival is group membership. Status games are a feature, not a bug.

So what we think about facts, rooted in our subconscious, is the need for group membership. We believe in the number of states, in the temperature of chicken, and the weekly mileage rule of thumb because they let us belong.

Don’t bring an educational solution to a design fight fits this theory. To change people’s minds you have to change their feelings. And to change their feelings you have to understand their group survival dynamics – which operate on the subconscious level. Design works because it defaults to group survival. Things are this way because people like us to things like this.

“We are a tribeless nation hungry for tribes,” opens Wright Thompson in his book, Pappyland. Much of McRaney’s book, How Minds Change has this thread too. We want to feel connected. And that wanting is subconscious.

Perfume Customers

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“So how do I convince women to buy their own perfume? How could I get the American woman to buy her own perfume? I would not call it perfume,” David Senra quotes from A Success Story by Estée Lauder.

In the 1950s and 60s women didn’t buy themselves perfume. Instead, it was a gift and is an example of JTBD’s customers or consumers dynamic.

In Jobs Theory, producers have to solve the job for both the customer and consumer. No one gets fired for buying IBM articulates the customer angle – but leaves out the consumer. Does IBM serve the job for users (and later, investors)? ymmv

But Lauder did something different. Rather than address the concerns of both groups, she took a page (or inspired one!) from The 22 Immutable Laws of Advertising. Or in the words of Ricky Bobby, if you ain’t first, you’re last.

David again, from A Success Story:

“I would call it Youth-Dew, a bath oil that dubbed as a skin perfume. That would be acceptable to buy because it was feminine, all American, and very girl next door to take baths, wasn’t it? And so think about the difference in size of bath oil, how many ounces you would sell compared to the size of like a perfume or cologne.

We created a mini revolution in the whole world. As I saw it took on a fresher, more stimulating aspect. Instead of using their French perfumes by the drop behind the ear, women were using Youth-Dew by the bottle in their bath water.

It doesn’t take a graduate school of business to figure out that that meant sales, beautiful sales. In 1953, Youth-Dew did about 50,000 worth of business for us. In 1984, that figure was over 150 million dollars.”

Beautiful.

Not demands, standards

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“I’ve got a big day tomorrow,” is a resistance free approach to drink less the night before. “My financial advisor says that’s a bad idea,” is a resistance free approach to answer financial questions.

Let’s add another. This one from the Chriss Voss (we’re fans!) book Full Fee Agent.

In this quote, Voss’ client explains her new pitch:

“First and foremost, I’m a full-service, full fee agent. I charge 6 percent, keep 3.5 percent, and give 2.5 percent to the buyer’s agent. I’m going to encourage you to price the property so that it will sell quickly, and that might very well be a price that’s less than what you’d like to see. I’m going to encourage you to invest in preparing it for sale, and you’re going to need to stage it. The last thing is that I don’t work 24/7. You’ll never need me and not get me, but you won’t need me at 10 p.m.“

Wow, that’s a lot of conditions, Voss’ client counterparty said, to which she replies, “I actually prefer to think of them as standards”.

Conditions are negotiable, fungible, and flexible.

But standards? That’s something else entirely.

Voss resonates so much because his approach is similar to JTBD.

JTBD and Voss emphasize finding what’s important not (necessarily) what is legible. Price, cost, dollars, numbers(!) are legible and value / jobs-to-be-done are less so. But the reverse is what’s important. It’s the outcome we want, and the price which could be nice.

Jobs theory isn’t a condition for business, it’s a standard.

Hockey Erosion

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“Tell me about training in general,” asked Rick Rubin, “How did, how was your training different than other hockey players from the time that you started?”

“I was ahead of the curve,” said Chris Chelios, ““because back then, even the guys that were supposedly in the best shape, all they did was bench press and jog or stationary bike. That was it in the early 80s.”

That’s good.

He saw results.

“And my skating improved so much and my strength and endurance. And unfortunately, TR got so many clients that became known throughout the league. And then he was training guys like Rob Blake…And then he wins the Norris Trophy, which is the best defenseman in the league. And I’m like, that’s not fair, TR. So I wouldn’t train with anybody else anymore…I needed another edge.”

Alpha erosion happens everywhere. If something is accessible (like finding the same trainer, paying, doing, etc.) people find it and the edges disappear.

Hard work isn’t an edge. Novel work is, for the moment, because alpha erodes.

MRI Jobs

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An older story but still good and still important.

Doug Dietz spent the last two years designing a new MRI machine and he goes to the hospital to see check on it.

“I noticed a father lean down and tell his daughter, ‘Remember, we’ve talked about this, you can be brave.'”

Doug follows the family into the room, with his new machine. “And she just freezes.”

The walls. The lights. The machine. The warning signs. “The little girl just starts to cry.”

Jobs to be done implores creators to create things from the perspective, needs, goals, and wants of the consumers, not the suppliers. From Doug’s angle, the hospital is the supplier. *Make something bland, generic, efficient.* There’s no flare – that’s expensive.

Yes, the consumers want some things that the hospital also wants: Make people better.

But these parents also want their daughter to stop crying. They don’t want her to be afraid. They want to her smile. They want the same thing we all want for our kids.

After seeing this scene, Doug got back to work and made this MRI machine next.

From IDEO U

What does AI make rare and valuable?

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Cal Newport asks is: What skills are rare and valuable? The answer leads to a whole book of career and life advice.

Our neck of the woods has a lot of bike riders. There’s a large retirement community, with many people who have or get, new hobbies. Pickleball, water volleyball, and golf are the three largest, but we see plenty of riders.

And many of them are e-bikes.

Purists (in the jtbd world this is supply side innovation) scoff. They might even mumble: ‘that’s not real bike riding’. But e-bikes changed how people cycle. We used to see many tandem riders, almost always couples who wanted to ‘ride together’ but didn’t ride at the same speed.

Now we see almost none.

Similarly, a friend said that a guy from his group got an e-bike. At first, like friends do, they gave him a hard time. But the bike lets the guy stay with the group. Rather than aging out, and into another group, the e-bike lets him stay with the pack.

In what ways will AI/LLM change work? Will we see people ‘ride together’? Will workers be older or will the adoption curve be steep and young people’s skills accelerate?

No one knows, much like no one predicted the e-bike adoption.

But, work will come back to Newport’s question: What is rare and valuable?

Note: I tried to run an outline through a LLM to create a blog post. None of the versions were the desired voice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Talent CAC Attraction

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Acquistion is a game of efficiency.

A friend told me his goal was to collect 100% of his potential customer’s contact information.

I told him that was wrong.

It’s difficult to identify your potential customers. Sure, everyone owns a refrigerator, but that doesn’t make everyone a potential customer for Maytag. That’s inefficient strategy.

What’s ideal is something we first identified from Warren Buffett’s letters. These marketing missives brought in Buffett’s brand of capital. They were people who thought like him and became his permanent capital base.

A few likely customers are better than many unlikely customers. This is not a Large N small p problem.

For hiring, Tyler Cowen recommends this, attraction. Books like, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google, are a condition of correlation. Is it that Google hires people who are good at puzzles or is it that people who are good at puzzles drift to Google?

“Well, the Teal Fellows Program has a very good record of picking winners. But I think the biggest part of interviewing is not how you interview, but rather which candidates do you attract. So it’s what you’ve done before the interview to make yourself exciting so the good people want to come to you, be looking for you.

And the same is true of Google. A lot of the questions they asked back then actually are not very robust or very relevant. But what Google did succeed in doing was establishing themselves as the exciting place to be for obvious reasons, and they attracted talent.

And if you get talent coming to you, it’s actually not that hard to be at least a pretty good interviewer. So that’s the part of the problem I would focus on.”

From Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future: Tyler Cowen: The future of talent in the 21st Century?, Jun 12, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tyler-cowen-the-future-of-talent-in-the-21st-century/id1535212212?i=1000658723619
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AI taking our Jobs (to be done)

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From Ben Thompson speaking on Sharp Tech in June 2024 about the Apple Intelligence demo from WWDC.

“No, what I found striking from the Apple event was it was a vision of how this will work in normal people’s lives, and it was a clearly articulated vision. Like if Siri cannot ingest all your old text messages and tell you what someone’s address is, or if Siri can work across emails and calendars.

That was the single best demo, was the woman who needed to pick up her mom…And there was information scattered across text messages and email. It was so relatable. Like we have all been in that situation.

What time is the flight? Where was the dinner reservation? Having to sort of go across apps and just being able to find the stuff.”

Thompson references this video, where Steve Jobs notes what Apple needs to do: “and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds, it’s not to talk about bits and megahertz, it’s not to talk about why we’re better than windows.”