Surprising insights from Peter Thiel’s destruction of Gawker Media
Three questions to check how future-proof is your business
I love the thoughtfulness and the deep thinking of Ryan Holiday’s books. They are easy to read and offer amazing insights into the subject he is approaching. “Conspiracy”, Ryan’s latest book, offers some thought-provoking takeaways about strategy and disruption. While Conspiracy is about the forces, events and Peter Thiel’s actions that led to Gawkers’ demise, I found a number of fascinating insights into what to look for to make sure that your business / organisation is on solid foundation:
What you and your executive team consider impossible to happen in your business?
“We don’t need to worry about those people because as they don’t think it’s possible, they will not take it seriously and they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.”
Peter Thiel
It is a great question to start a strategy discussion as it can potentially illuminate blind spots — areas where nobody is paying attention because it is considered impossible or highly unlikely that it will happen. It is worth exploring what is the rationale to think that way and how would we know if that was true. This question will also help you outline some of the assumptions that your business is built on.
Gawker’s leadership thought it was impossible for them to be sued. Very few people have tried. They were not successful. The First Amendment provides a strong shield for the press. It is expensive and time-consuming to sue; challengers will go through a humiliating process of having their life in the public space, the very thing they want to avoid. So, they believed that they were sufficiently protected from law suits.
What are the assumptions that your business is built on? How do you know that they will hold true in the future?
Ryan Holiday illustrates the key assumptions underlying Gawker’s business — Gawker is protected to publish whatever they want because people will not sue them; Gawker has the public support as the underdog that exposes the rich and famous (and America loves the underdog); What Gawker fails to recognise is the circumstances when those assumptions may not hold true. For example, while the public may generally like to read gossip, the environment in terms of what is acceptable online changed significantly in the ten years since Gawker was founded. In one instance Gawker saw themselves losing public support for outing a well-known married men and gay-shaming him.
How is your culture impacting your future?
Last but not least, examining the culture and the incentives in the business and whether they support the future direction that the company needs to take is another critical step. Chances are that if the assumptions underlying your business so far need to change, so is the culture.
In the Gawker example, the culture was one where all that mattered were the page views — the more controversial and scandalous the post, the better. Writers felt that it is their right to bring to light the secrets of other people without thinking about the impact on the human being on the other side or they believed that there are no red lines in what they were doing. This may have been true for some time but as public sentiment about privacy started to change, Gawker started to see that more and more people found some of their behaviour unacceptable. The leadership started to see that but they had a very well established culture, incentives aligned to support it and core of people who were not willing to change direction.
So, in summary, disruption almost always comes from what you think is impossible. Watch out for those assumption you are making, particularly those that you do not realise you are making them