Measurminator
This post cost me a full year of a premium Netflix subscription. Three years ago, my son Faisal coined the term “Measurminator,” while pointing to a measuring tape.
While envisioning this post, I imagined using “Measurminator” as its title. After a tough negotiation, Faisal got his Netflix subscription in exchange for letting me use his word. Well done, Faisal! You invented and monetized a word!
So, have you ever heard the phrase “numbers don’t lie?” It is 100% correct. Numbers are raw data, incapable of lying or telling you the truth, but once they are transformed (by a human) into information, unfortunately, they can mislead as well as lie. Even when you apply simple math to convert numbers into ratios, such ratios only reveal a fraction of the whole episode, and they can give multiple meanings, depending on the context you situate them in.
Such data (numbers and ratios) consolidate a full year of corporate politics, executives’ honesty and sometimes dishonesty, mistakes, and occasionally deliberate wrongdoing. Yet, such data are the conventional interface in measuring the health of the business world. The blind spots are too many if you only depend on outdated x-ray (financial statements and their notes).
During the Industrial Age, when businesses controlled the means of productions (supply, assets, workforce, etc.), it was practical to measure companies’ past performance by extrapolating historical data from their value chains. However, their future trajectories were navigated via blurry canvases.
Today (in the internet era), things changed a bit. If you neither own nor control the means of productions, and instead, merely orchestrate interactions via a platform-based business, then your value chain will be anemic toward supplying you with reliable data (does WeWork ring a bell here?). Today, in the age of platforms, you must become a Measurminator.
The Measurminator idea was hovering in my mind for a long time, but it got proliferated with this must-see video.
Both Christensen and Hagel, at the SU Global Summit, consolidated the embedded knowledge within their books and represented their theories in a harmonized way. Their theories were converging and intersecting, which is a priceless opportunity to understand the future challenges of the business world.
I envisioned uniting a thread of Clayton’s thinking, with a strand of John’s thoughts, to help us in enhancing how we measure platform-based businesses.
The Measurminator refers to a zooming-based measurement approach that intersects two different dimensions:
Theory-based measurement is reproduced (copied) from Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life and the Jobs to be Done theory. The aim is to understand the causality between our actions and the yielded results, in order to help us evolve within an existing trajectory or drift into a new trajectory. The theory-based measurement forces you to focus on the theory behind the subject matter. As Christensen clarified, “understanding the customer is the wrong unit of analysis, you got to understand the job they are trying to get done.”
Horizon-based measurement is inspired by John Hagel and John Seely Brown’s article “Zoom out/Zoom in — An alternative approach to strategy in a world that defies prediction.” The horizon-based measurement aims at rigorously stretching and stress-testing the theory-based measurement into multiple horizons.
Visually, this is what the Measurminator looks like.
We need an example to beef up the Measurminator’s thinking. In The Only Sustainable Edge, Hagel and Brown illustrated Microsoft as a company that embraces a long-term perspective on the premise of “Computing power is moving inexorably to desktop.” However, back then, the zoom out was within a ten-years range. So, I would argue that Microsoft’s long-term perspective wasn’t long enough, which explains (to me) why Microsoft misunderstood mobile.
You might not wholly fathom how Microsoft misunderstood mobile, only via Clayton’s Disruptive Innovation and the pursuit of profit lenses. (Apple was not a disruptor, and the iPhone was not a cheap product, nor inferior in technology.) To digest the whole story, you must add the zoom out/zoom in to the recipe.
Unlike the classical disruptive innovation scenario, where an incumbent keeps positioning itself upmarket, driven by gross margin. In Microsoft’s situation, there was no lower market in computing, since Apple was operating in a parallel ecosystem. Thus, Windows (Microsoft’s cash cow) gross margin blindsided Microsoft from understanding such a parallel ecosystem. Microsoft ordained that computing must reside on your desk.
In contrast, Apple, with its prolonged zoom-out perspective, realized that people wanted computing on the go (in their pockets) to enhance their daily experiences. Apple viewed the internet as its ecosystem, and the iPhone was a differentiated strategy to enable its customers to unlock the hidden potentials. Apple saw the future via an opportunity-based narrative empowered with a focused zoom out/zoom in perspective. Apple’s “think different” narrative, as explained by Hagel, was an essential ingredient for its long-term trajectory.
Microsoft viewed Windows as its ecosystem. Unlike the conventional thinking, that Microsoft brought a phone into an ecosystem’s fight, I would argue that Microsoft entered the fight (a bit late) with ecosystem’s mentality, too, but with a very limited, ecosystem-obedient Windows. Windows was the core, as well as the periphery of the ecosystem (i.e., Microsoft capped its customers’ thinking within the boundaries of Windows’ latest version).
For example, within the theory-based measurement dimension, Microsoft narrowly understood the “job” in the jobs to be done, from its technical definition rather than being a metaphor. Accordingly, they kept enhancing the functionalities and features of Windows, Office, etc. from the business and professional viewpoints (i.e., what companies, executives and employees need to accomplish).
The other problem is that Microsoft’s horizon of the business landscape was not comprehensive enough. Their horizon-based measurement missed the shift in professionals’ behaviors. (With the internet in motion, they couldn’t operate in a cubical setup anymore.)
Apple understood the shift, so it handed its customers a genie’s lamp and enabled them to think differently (unlimited wishes). Apple allowed the horizon-based measurement to stretch the theory-based measurement in space and time (i.e., pulling the job to be done far enough in time, to explore and extract different experiences).
Fast forward to today, if we use the same approach (i.e., Measurminator), we will see how Microsoft learned from the mobile episode (venturing from a threat-based narrative that was driven by securing market shares to a wider opportunity-based narrative).
From the theory-based measurement perspective, Microsoft redefined its understanding of its customers’ jobs to be done. And steadily the company is moving into the “context to be shaped” territory, a concept articulated by John Hagel in the Contextual Age: a granular level of understanding customers from the professional context as well as social context.
From the horizon-based measurement perspective, Microsoft is stretching the jobs to be done, and extracting different experiences, as well as enabling (experiences) them to proliferate and converge to shape new contexts.
Towards this end, Microsoft spent $26 billion to acquire LinkedIn. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft is eagerly excavating deeply underneath our professional layer, and Microsoft is trying to understand us holistically to alter our professional DNA to humanize our professional behavior (emending our professional graph within our social graph).
Now, let us see if the Measurminator approach applies to us as investors.
As an investor, the Monthly Active Users (“MAU”) metric (in plain English) is meaningless. Twitter discontinued using it earlier this year and introduced a slightly better metric (monetizable Daily Active Users “mDAU”). Seriously?
The MAU doesn’t reveal much; it merely informs us that several users are active during a month. But it does not explain to you, precisely, what those users are being active in.
Growth in a preceding month MAU might ignite a negative network effect, the upcoming month: what if the growth in activity embeds within it a carcinogen substance (e.g., hateful conduct, child sexual exploitation, violent threats, glorification of violence, terrorism, racism, etc.)?
The Measurminator will place the MAU within the theory-based measurement lens. As theorized by Christensen, the customer (user) is the wrong metric of measure, and we must measure the jobs to be done (e.g., Monthly Active Jobs to be Done “MAJ2bD”).
Then the updated MAJ2bD will pass through the horizon-based measurement — stretching those jobs to be done in time to explore any possible variations in the underlying experiences.
Let us explore Twitter from an opportunity-based narrative and threat-based narrative.
Opportunity based narrative
The Measurminator can help Twitter to reposition itself on The Social/Communication Map by zooming into the different jobs to be done and re-envisioning the underlying experiences.
For example, a conventional viewpoint might narrowly condense the common ground between Twitter and Snapchat, in time only (i.e., a minute spent on Snapchat is an opportunity cost for Twitter).
Break down their user’s activities in terms of jobs to be done, and Twitter might get inspired by Snapchat to do something crazy. Imagine Twitter giving our tweets, unique identities via filters (Snapchat filters) that can exemplify a visual character underneath the merits of our texts. Tweets that can (visually/artistically) impersonate and transform themselves by leveraging the underlying context (anger, sadness, joy, etc.).
What about Twitter and Amazon (Kindle)? How can both platforms condense liquidity within their network effects?
What about accessing Kindle via your Twitter account? Any idea what can happen? Let us see.
1- Amazon (via Kindle) can supply Twitter with rich content: tweetable text from your favorite books (i.e., Amazon creating liquidity for Twitter).
2- While reading a book, you can choose a default text, or most highlighted text, or even select your favorable section and send it as a tweetable text. The tweet will automatically hashtag the heading with other keywords, automatically embed the authors of the book into your tweet, as well as including the book link to Amazon store.
3- Maybe one of the book’s authors, interact with the tweet (i.e., igniting a social context around the book).
4- The social context might invite serendipitous engagement, thanks to Twitter’s network effects, which might persuade another tweeter to click the link and buy the book from Amazon (i.e., Twitter creating liquidity for Amazon).
5- The book’s authors can further enrich the social context by gifting a copy of the book via Amazon to a tweeter who was actively engaged with the tweetable text (i.e., users creating liquidity for both Amazon and Twitter).
Threat based narrative
During this coming decade, platform-based businesses will face a new threat within the Network Defects sphere. I call it the “Break-up Effects”. The break-up effect hits suddenly and irreversibly. Unlike the (i) Negative Network Effects, that shrink the network gradually overtimes; (ii) Multi-homing, which takes place simultaneously over a long period; and (iii) Switching Cost, which happens on and off and subject to multiple factors.
Every single dimension in the above picture (once proved commercially), can create a significant impact on our behaviors. Just imagine what might happen if multiple dimensions converge. In a nutshell, a wide range of products, services, interactions, jobs to be done along with their underlying experiences will become irrelevant. History is repeating itself: It happened at the dawn of the industrial revolution, but this time, it will be different.
Imagine that instead of reading or watching the news, you can be in the news or part of the news! What if Google, via its enhanced mapping system and AR/VR technology (via an elegant smart glasses), can place you (virtually) in the heart of an event?
Let it be, in a middle of a human rights protest, distanced village just hit by a tsunami, or with civilians in a war zone. Whatever the situation might be, you get the chance to be with them (virtually), sharing them your compassion, and empathy.
What if Google can enable you to help them (financially) on the spot, while you are talking to them and (virtually) holding their hand? With such an experience, do you think you will ever log-in to your Twitter account? This is the break-up effects in a fiction story-telling.
In a nutshell, Measurminator allows you to look beyond numbers and data to understand the why behind the what. It enables you to broaden your vision and narrowing your blind spots. It allows you to get inspired, to change, to learn, to reflect, to refine and to stay relevant.
Special thanks to Clayton Christensen, John Hagel and John Seely Brown for their knowledge and wisdom. And a big thanks to my son Faisal.
You are most welcome to connect via https://twitter.com/KhalidiAlmadani or https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalid-al-madani-2009a1160/
