What Bob Dylan Teaches Us About Digital Strategy

What Bob Dylan Teaches Us About Digital Strategy Bob Dylan has decided to sell the rights to his entire music catalog to a major music label. Let’s look at what Bob Dylan teaches us about digital strategy. A corporation now owns Bob Dylan’s entire life's work—he no longer owns the underlying property that made him famous in the first place. That's a big deal. Why did he decide to sell the rights to his music? Was it because of his age? Or, because of the rise of streaming services, did he feel he could get the best price now? In the past, you had to look at album sales from a record store if you wanted to know which artist was most popular. With the rise of digital technology and the rise of an economy where the barriers to entry have collapsed, we are seeing who the true winners are. A record store arranged its music on the shelves as a function of what was selling the most and because of deals with different record labels. If a record label was running a major promotion for an artist, they would get prime space in the store, so consumers were more likely to…

Stories You Tell Yourself About Your Career

Stories You Tell Yourself About Your Career As we go into 2021, a lot is happening in the world. If anything, COVID hasn’t changed the pace of innovation. Competition is not slowing down. We live in a world of enormous change. This is good for your career because there are more opportunities. But it can also be bad for your career if you’re not the best-suited person for that opportunity. Recently, I spoke to a client who works in the search engine division of a tech company. He said there was nothing he could take to his superiors that would get them excited about putting the investment in to grow their division. When I have discussions with clients, clearly I can't give them all the answers because I don't know all the problems involved. When people talk about their problems, they usually sanitize it to make it sound like there's really nothing they can do, and they want me to affirm their lack of options and say it’s not their fault. In this particular case, it’s his career and it’s his division—he has a lot of opportunities, so he needs to do something about it. You will be telling yourself…

India & “Digital Strike”: the Underlying Mechanics

India & “Digital Strike”: the Underlying Mechanics Financial Times had a piece about how India has decided that they will no longer allow several Chinese apps to operate within the borders of India. I want to talk about the underlying mechanics of what's happening here. India is doing this because it wants to achieve something, which they think can be accomplished by creating an environment that is not conducive for apps from certain countries. So the question is: What does India need, and who is getting punished for this action? Someone is always getting punished when you take legislative action. That's the nature of economics; there's not enough to go around, so any decision you make is about deciding who will benefit and who won’t. India, like any other nation, needs capital, expertise and creativity. India has banned those apps from the market because they believe that they can get funding, expertise and creativity from other countries and within their own borders—homegrown competitors. Because certain nations are close competitors, India doesn’t want them to benefit from their large consumer market. Here’s the question: Should you be turning away any capital, any expertise or any creativity? That’s what government of India needs to think about. In a world that is fighting…

Will Creating the Super League Render a Teams’ Status Moot?

Will Creating the Super League Render a Teams’ Status Moot? An article from Financial Times is about a plan underway to build a new super league for European football that sits above the Champions League, backed by financial powerhouses. In Europe, each country has its own domestic league made up of 15-30 teams. If there are 20 in a league, a team will play all the other teams twice. The team with the most points at the end is crowned the champion of the domestic league, then the top two teams of each domestic league play in a special competition. In the plans to create a new super league for the biggest and wealthiest teams, there is debate about what the qualifications should be—maybe it’s not about who wins the domestic league, but should be based on popularity, size of spectator base, and the amount of money a team has. This raises a deep question. What makes a team a team? What makes Liverpool Football Club, Liverpool Football Club? No matter what happens, people from Liverpool are going to support their team. What would happen if Liverpool Football Club accepted a $20 billion investment from the government of Abu Dhabi to relocate and play…

Asian Governments: Debt & Taxation

Asian Governments: Debt & Taxation There’s a piece in Nikkei Asia about how Asian governments—for a very long time—believed in lean, decentralized governments. For a country to run, they believed they needed to create an environment where private sector investments and regional governments would step up, but the central government would play a very limited role. In fact, Asian governments considered westernized governments—where the state played a big role—to be outdated, lethargic and not competitive enough for the long term. With COVID, the role of Asian governments has started to shift. COVID has forced governments to shatter any illusions they once held. Most Asian governments believed that if they took on too much debt, they would suffer. But COVID gave them no choice—they had to take on debt. Now these Asian governments have realized they’re not suffering, the investment community is not punishing their bonds, and they’re not experiencing credit rating downgrades. By taking on more debt that is being used effectively to bolster their capitalist system, the investment community is actually rewarding them. This is encouraging many Asian governments to take on more debt. Previously, federal governments—or national governments—would mainly focus on things like health care and defense. But now governments are moving into…

Apple iPhone 12: Pride vs. Power

Apple iPhone 12: Pride vs. Power In an investigative piece from Nikkei Asia, journalists broke down the Apple iPhone 12 into its separate components, assigning dollar value and determining the origin country of each component. They found that 26.8% of the value of components in an Apple iPhone 12 comes from Korea; 21.9% from the United States; the little island of Taiwan contributed 11.1%; and Japan contributed 13.6%. This matters because every brand or product inherently has national and regional pride attached to it. Americans are rightly proud that Steve Jobs developed the iPhone—with a team of people reporting under him—in California, USA. While the iPhone was developed in the US, a large chunk of its components come from other countries. For every Apple iPhone 12 bought, a large percentage of that money is not going to Apple—it's going to a group of component manufacturers in Korea, Taiwan, Japan and many other countries. The insight is a lot deeper than that. Countries that supply for Apple iPhone 12 are building a reservoir of cash, and they want to do something with it. Most likely, they’ll start building their own branded products. We saw this with Taiwan in the 80s and 90s. For a long…

Productivity + Proposals (Monday Morning 8am #4)

Hello everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this newsletter, we’re going to focus on four major themes from last week’s news. To listen to the audio version of this newsletter, search for “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app. Productivity Nikkei Asia reported that Bangladesh's output per citizen is now equal to the output per citizen in neighboring India. For a long time, few thought Bangladesh would develop anything close to a macroeconomic policy that would lift the population out of poverty. It’s a significant achievement—not just for Bangladesh but for other countries that are trying to follow that same path. What makes Bangladesh unusual is that a large part of their strategy was bringing women into the workforce and building infrastructure and policies to support a burgeoning textile industry. But why does this matter? Imagine there is a family from China who has just arrived in New York. Neither of the parents have university degrees. They both work at a restaurant, and they have four kids to raise. The parents pay their bills, but they only spend money on things that will increase their ability to make…

MM8am Not all risk is

Hello, everyone! This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a weekly newsletter where we distill the insights from all of the distractions, articles, and emails that you receive in your inbox every day. In this week’s newsletter, we’re going to focus on one overarching theme, risk, and you’ll see that theme running through all of the big stories this week. You can also listen to our podcast series if you search “Strategy Skills”—which this newsletter is based on—in any podcast app. Not All Risk Is Equal Financial Times did a fantastic piece looking at why COVID-19 had much less of an impact on Africa than many had expected. The expectation had always been that the more developed economies—within Europe, the United States, Canada, and within Asia, for example—should have performed better than less developed countries that don’t have as much disposable income and resources to combat the virus. There are a few theories on why Africa wasn’t as hard hit by the virus. One theory is that because populations in some parts of the world have less access to health protection, they have developed a built-in immunity. This is just a theory—it might be right or wrong. The article raises a…

MM8am What is Netflix’s real strategy?

Hi, everyone. This is Monday Morning 8 a.m., a newsletter that goes out—as you guessed it—every Monday. You can listen to the audio version of this Monday Morning 8 a.m. episode by searching “Strategy Skills” in any podcast app! In this newsletter, we have one goal: to help you distill the insights from the noise out there. So here are the big themes we’re noticing in the news this week and the deep insights you should be extracting from those themes. A Tribute and Insights from Asia First, we’re going to start with a tribute to the former chairman of Samsung Group, Lee Kun-hee, who passed-away last week after being in a post-heart attack coma for 6 years. He was responsible for Samsung’s meteoric rise, and he did what many people thought was impossible. You’d have to go back to the ‘80s and ‘90s to understand the magnitude of how much South Korea has changed. Consider that during those years, Japan was a global powerhouse. Japanese electronics controlled the world. Conglomerates like Sony were buying up property and shares in corporate America. Eventually, Japan overtook the former Soviet Union as the second largest economy in the world. At that point, no one had heard much of South Korea. We all knew…