Top Shelf Reading Picks:

I’ve found another must read Top Shelf Pick for 2009: Kevin Maney’s Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On and Others Don’t.  Any book that makes me rethink my biz plan is a must-read, and while this didn’t cause me to change direction, it did solidify that our new plan is taking us in the right direction.

Initially, I thought this was going to be a marketing book (sort of like Made to Stick), but it’s really more of a discussion around your company’s mission statement and core values.  The main premise is that every business has a trade-off.  You can either excel in providing a high-fidelity experience or in being extremely convenient.  If you’re in the middle for both, you end up in the “Fidelity Belly” (kind of like the doldrums . . . or to use a dating example . . .  it’s like dating someone who is vanilla–everything about them is fine, but nothing is outstanding. )

Any company or product that tries to capture both fidelity and convenience ends up in the Fidelity Belly and will more than likely fail.  Maney provides Starbucks and Coach bags as examples.  They both tried to mass market a luxury product, which when you think about it is a bit of an oxymoron:  mass-marketed luxury?  Not possible . . . the definition of luxury is something expensive or hard to obtain.

If you’re chasing convenience

A super-convenient product is one where people will forgo a nicer experience due to time, cost or easy accessibility, i.e. Wal-Mart.

But in addition to being affordable and easy, if you can add a social dimension, it acts as an adoption accelerant.  This is why teens will buy a cell-phone ring . . . Downloading it is convenient, but a ring tone also announces your taste in music to the world, giving it great social value.

However, manufacturing a social dimension doesn’t always work.  Maney points to USA Today’s 2006 attempt to create a social network around its newspaper.  They found out that you can’t force a social aspect onto something that is not inherently social.  I started to debate this example in my head because, in some sense, the comments on NYTimes.com sort of work like a social dimension (and I probably e-mail an article or two per week to friends).  But, then again, I feel an affinity with someone who reads the NYTimes, and not sure USA Today readers feel the same.

If you’re hoping for fidelity

You need the following formula:   Experience + Aura + Identity = Fidelity.

Experience means giving someone a feeling/situation that is high-quality, i.e., iPhone, high-fidelity experience; exceptionally inconvenient access(price/AT&T).

Identity:  Maney uses the Kindle for this example–stating that it’s missing the Identity component: that is, you are what you read, and when you read on a Kindle, no one knows what you are reading.  As I write this I realize that this is also a component of convenience . . . but it seems that Maney is saying there needs to be identity when it comes to fidelity; but if your goal is convenience, then it’s a nice bonus, but less necessary.

The Kindle is an interesting example that Maney brings up.  It’s very expensive, so not convenient, so it must be a high-fidelity play.  Yet, does it improve the experience of reading a book?  The jury is still out on that one.  Besides, when you think about it, the majority of book purchasers are “mass market,” and most people buy paperbacks, which are still quite convenient.  So the Kindle seems to be in the Fidelity Belly.

Aura:  Super-fidelity is sustainable, but it can’t be done on Aura alone. Maney uses Crocs as an example.  The more a company relies on Aura, or being cool and trendy, the more easily it can be toppled from its perch.

Should  you be convenient or high-fidelity?

Convenience is needed; fidelity is loved.  In other words, people tend to choose the most convenient product or service most of the time but treat themselves to fidelity.  This is why it might not be wise to launch a high-fidelity product during an economic recession, although the iPhone seemed to defy those odds.

High-fidelity products have a smaller audience and therefore need a higher profit margin.  Convenient products have lower margins and therefore need to reach larger audiences.

While Maney promotes an almost all-or-nothing approach, one or the other, he does note that adding the right touch of fidelity to a high-convenience product or service, or the right touch of convenience to fidelity, can make for a powerful, competitor-beating concoction.

Warning: Don’t forget the Tech effect.  Technology drives fidelity and convenience. Wherever your product or service lands today on the fidelity or convenience spectrum, it may well be in a different position tomorrow.

Throughout the book Maney focuses on a lot of different companies and products:   iRobot’s Roomba, Tiffany’s, newspapers and higher education. Being a Washington Capitals fan, I was really interested in his take on how the team turned into one of the most exciting in hockey.  But Maney also brought up something that’s been bugging me for a while–instead of trying to boost TV ratings for NHL hockey, i.e., only showing playoffs on obscure cable channels (I had to follow some games via Twitter), why not live stream them on the internet?  Go for the convenience.  Especially if the majority of the NHL’s demographics have access to a computer.  After all, the existing plan isn’t working.

Top Shelf Bottom Line. Like most trend books, it gets to a point where the author is saying the same thing over and over but with more and different illustrations.   Nevertheless, it kept me reading to the end and I could easily grasp the different examples.   This is a definite must-read if you don’t know where your company falls on the Fidelity/Convenience Trade-offs chart, or you want to fine tune your future growth.

DKD Sidebar: I tried applying this to my business, the Downtown Women’s Club.  Last year we launched our new tagline: Professional networking that’s affordable, effective and fun!  Clearly we’re going for convenience.

But this book made me realize that people still want a high-fidelity networking experience.  Some of our local clubs do provide this in abundance (which is our high-fidelity aspect).  However, after reading this book, I came away with the idea that we need to provide more networking “content” as opposed to “contacts.”

Let the other 99 percent of our competitors focus on making introductions for only a select group of people.  Instead, we’ll provide the skills and tools everyone needs to create her own networks, wherever they may be.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  I’ll keep you posted.

How can you apply this to your own company/service/product? Ask yourself the following:

1. Are you high-fidelity or convenient?
2. Do you have a high or low profit margin?
3. Can you add a social component to your product/service?
4. Do you rely too much on your aura?
5. Can you be displaced easily by new technologies?
6. Are you in the Fidelity Belly?

Need help answering those?  Buy the book!

For the past few weeks I’ve been listening to the audio book of Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America. Sometimes it’s hard to write a review after “listening” to a book because I can’t refer back to the brightly colored stickies I usually place on the parts that I liked. However, considering the topic of this book, I was starting to feel bad about the great numbers of stickies I normally use while doing book reviews.

Still, I realize that this is minimal waste (and I do reuse them when I can), as one of the main themes of the book is that the environmental crisis we are facing is so huge that reducing our own individual carbon footprint is but a drop in the bucket. Sure, we should do it, but that alone won’t correct the treacherous path we are headed down.

The book is jam-packed with information; while it’s preachy and clearly takes the liberal path (promoting government-backed solutions), there were some universal themes in there that we all need to know about.

Small disclaimer. I have to admit, while listening to this book, I couldn’t help but think of it as the back story to my two favorite books growing up as a child: The Lorax by Dr. Seuss; and The Wump World by Bill Peet; as well as the more recent children’s movie Wall-E. All are identical in theme, so you can probably tell where I fall on this spectrum, having been inducted into the “save the environment” cause from age 5. Yet, here are some of the concepts from Friedman that struck me as new and different.

Global weirding. As I sit through the wettest and coldest New England summer that I can remember, I agree that “global warming” is not the best term to describe the climate. It’s not necessarily warmer, but the weather is certainly weirder.

The rise of India’s and China’s middle class. Friedman talks about how the rise of two enormous middle classes (this is where the flat and crowded part comes in) is going to have an unprecedented effect on our climate, such that even if all Americans reduced their carbon footprint, it wouldn’t be enough to curtail any climate changes.

The role of TV weatherpeople. I recall hearing about the controversy in December 2006 when Weather Channel personality Dr. Heidi Cullen called for meteorologists to educate themselves and their TV audiences about global warming. The backlash from the global warming skeptics was huge, claiming that meteorologists shouldn’t be political. As Friedman makes clear . . . weather/climate should not be a political issue.

The second point that was made in this section was the disconnect between the hard-core scientific community and the TV personalities. If you are a TV personality, then you can’t be doing serious science. Yet these are the folks who can get America’s attention. Somehow these two groups have to find common ground.

Detroit. Friedman trots out the story of Detroit’s excuse for making the Hummer. They claimed that this is what Americans wanted, so they gave it to them. Just because a few people want something doesn’t mean it’s a good thing . . . not to mention that if people never knew they could have it, would they really want it?

This story always makes me cringe because the right to oversize SUVs seems to be ingrained in our society. For example, I recently had a conversation about Hummers with a very good friend who is a tutor. He made a comment about how one of his students needed a Hummer because she attended Colgate University in upstate NY and the snow is really bad. It only took him a few seconds to see the humor in the situation as I reminded him that once upon a time I, too, went to Colgate University, and my Honda Civic–the very same one that was nearly totaled by a deer while visiting him at Princeton 20 years ago–worked just fine (although I did have to toss a couple of sandbags in the back). That Honda Civic and I even managed to chauffeur Joe Biden around campus one dark and snowy night . . . another story worth telling someday.

So, what’s the takeaway from all these points?

1. We have a problem too big for individual efforts or possibly even the government to resolve.
2. We need entrepreneurs (i.e. people who think differently) to help come up with some sort of solution.
3. We need to sit the entrepreneurs down in a room with the scientists and some marketing folks.

This is a huge project. But it’s possible. For example, some very smart people in New Orleans realized that the government wasn’t coming to fix things, so they put out the call to entrepreneurs. Groups such as www.ideavillage.com are still there trying to attract and empower entrepreneurs in NOLA. We need something like that on a global scale that centers around our climate.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line: Friedman is very good at boiling down complex ideas so all of us can understand them. Like The World is Flat, it’s a concept book with a lot of examples and illustrations. I actually like that, as some of these stuck with me, and some of them didn’t. Worth wading through for entrepreneurs because this is a problem that needs an entrepreneurial solution.

But now, says the Once-ler,
Now that you’re here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

– Dr. Suess, The Lorax, 1971.